Winged Tales: The Advent of the Imperial Beast Fable

Abstract

In the nineteenth century, non-European beast fables played a significant role in the making of the British Empire. They were among the first texts which the colonisers studied to learn local languages, and their global migratory paths, traced by comparative philologists, embodied the cosmopolitan nature of the fast-expanding Empire. In this context, the chapter discuses Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books as the state fable of the British Empire, alongside another reworking of non-European fables, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus, a ‘beast fable’ of post-Civil-War America. In both cases, the white settlers/colonisers are shown to be educated in the school of non-European fables in which animals, who welcome the colonisers, teach them the art of migration, transculturation and colonial appropriation.