The Spirit of the Jest: Humour, Incongruity and Kipling's Engagement with Modernity

This thesis investigates Kipling's response to colonialism, capitalism and modernity, as a total system, and one that he engaged with in a critical and creative way. It does so by tracing the threads of incongruity and humour. This approach has been taken for a number of reasons. Firstly, Kipling's interest in the incongruous, appears not only in the material dealing with the colonial East, but extends throughout his writing career. Secondly, humour and incongruity are features that contribute to the aesthetic and ambivalence of Kipling's work, and their absence usually denotes a shift into a particularly dark and introspective register. Finally, incongruity and humour are rarely examined in Kipling's work (C. A. Bodelsen and J.M.S. Tompkins are rare exceptions), and their significance in his material has not been fully explored.