Children's Response to Kipling's Patterns of Communication ‎in Just So Stories: For Little Children

     The role played by the reader in interacting with a text and constructing its meaning is a pivotal one. According to the reader- response criticism, the text, particularly the literary one, needs a dynamic kind of reader who resorts to his experience and imagination to form the meaning of the text. Literary texts transform reading into a creative process through which the reader activates his imagination to create the world presented by them. It is the coming together of the reader's imagination and the text that endows the text with its reality. As the interpretations of literary texts cannot be told in their entirety, the reader has to establish connections between the different parts of the text to form its entire meaning. This paper aims at investigating children's response in Kipling's Just So Stories: For Little Children. It examines the techniques used by Kipling in order to stimulate the child reader to interact with the stories. The study concentrates on the first seven stories of the collection as all of them are interesting animal stories.
     Kipling uses a unique style throughout the stories. He supports each story by two illustrations and finally a poem that mostly elaborates the theme of the story. His funny situations, humorous discourse, word game and coinage of words hold the ear of children and amuse them. Moreover, his attractive techniques persuade children to interact with them and develop into critical readers as well.  The study concludes that Kipling's skillful writing style successfully stirs the emotions, imagination and interaction of his young readers.