Imperial Beast Fables

This book coins the term ‘imperial beast fable’ to explore modern forms of human-animal relationships and their origins in the British Empire. Taking as a starting point the long nineteenth-century fascination with non-European beast fables, it examines literary reworkings of these fables, such as Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books , in relation to the global politics of race, language, and species. The imperial beast fable figures variably as a key site where the nature and origins of mankind are h