‘McAndrew, come awa’!’: Scots and Imperial Gothic in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’

Although Rudyard Kipling deployed a wide range of language varieties throughout his prolific literary career, only some of them have received sustained attention. This article focuses on Scots, which, despite being used in several of his literary works, has been comparatively more neglected than other language varieties equally represented in both his poetry and fiction. While also discussing Kipling’s two-fold appropriation of Scots and of the literary tradition associated with it in a variety of relevant poems and short stories, I suggest that this stylistic choice serves particularly important aesthetic and ideological functions within the dramatic monologue ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’. In what I identify as a poetic instance of imperial Gothic, I argue, Kipling’s stylized Scots is exploited not only for characterization purposes, but also as the language of the uncanny. In attending to the poetics and politics of a particular text, the article not only builds upon the effort of those scholars who have contributed to the historicization of Kipling’s literary language over the years, but it also provides an example of how the complex interplay of style and ideology in his literary works may be fruitfully examined rather than conveniently ignored.