Summary: Publisher Summary 1 Though the works of British novelist Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) have been widely and thoroughly dissected, says Walsh (English and American literature, U. of Reading, Britain), those assigned to the category children's literature have been assumed too simple and transparent to sustain serious academic attention. She argues that in fact they are complex and multi-dimensional, and actually constitute a challenge to the critical assumptions and practices that operate around children's literature. The line between children's and adult literature is not as clear as many assume, she says, not only in Kipling, but elsewhere as well. Among her topics are the child as colonized or the colonized as child, translating animal or reading the Other in the Mowgli stories, biographical readings, the oral and the written in the Taffy stories, the child and the primitive, and Kipling and history. Annotation 漏2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)