Mukherjee, Pablo. “Nimrods: Hunting, Authority,
Identity.” The Modern Language Review 100, no 4 (October 2005): 923-939.
Mukherjee discusses Kingsley’s treatment of hunting and game-keeping and
their relationship to evolving social authority in his novel Yeast.
The hero Lancelot Smith is initially depicted as a man whose education owes
far more to sports and hunting than to book learning. His manliness promoted
by hunting would come to typify Victorian imperial authority. However, Lancelot’s
education develops as he learns more from the gamekeeper Tregarva about the
rural poverty and human suffering on the land on which he hunts and which
he has hitherto blindly considered picturesque. Tregarva humanizes the hunting
countryside for Lancelot. “Lancelot’s education as one of the British elite,
that had begun with a spontaneous appreciation of the hunt as a knitter of
physical and moral fibre, is completed only after the gamekeeper implants
in him a particular code of social, paternalist responsibility that in turn
constructs the idealized vision of order” (928).
Yeast;
Hunting;
Rural
Life; Education.
|
