Imperial Beast Fables

Kaori Nagai is Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Kent, UK. She is the author of Empire of Analogies: Kipling, India and Ireland (2006). She has edited Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills and The Jungle Books for Penguin Classics, and is the co-editor of Kipling and Beyond (2010), and Cosmopolitan Animals (2015).

• Introduction: Rats in the Box.- Chapter 1: Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable.- Chapter 2: ‘Once Upon a Time When Animals Spoke’: Theories of the Beast Fable.- Chapter 3: Into the Chinese Boxes: The Jungle Books.- Chapter 4: Kangaroo Notebook: Abe’s Metatherian Journey.- Chapter 5: Animal Alphabets: Chesterton’s Dog, Browning’s Rats, Lear’s Blue Baboon.- Chapter 6: Fabling Cosmopolitanism: The Ark Esperanto.

“Imperial Beast Fables constitute impressively erudite yet readable additions to work at the intersection of Victorian literatures and history, genre studies, animal studies, and postcolonial critique. Scholars … will find their provocations impossible to bypass.” (Parama Roy, Victorian Studies, Vol. 65 (1), 2022)