Jack London (1876-1916), known for his naturalistic and mythic tales, remains among the most popular and influential American writers in the world. Jack London's Racial Lives offers the first full ...study of the enormously important issue of race in London's life and diverse works, whether set in the Klondike, Hawaii, or the South Seas or during the Russo-Japanese War, the Jack Johnson world heavyweight bouts, or the Mexican Revolution. Jeanne Campbell Reesman explores his choices of genre by analyzing racial content and purpose and judges his literary artistry against a standard of racial tolerance. Although he promoted white superiority in novels and nonfiction, London sharply satirized racism and meaningfully portrayed racial others-most often as protagonists-in his short fiction. Why the disparity? For London, racial and class identity were intertwined: his formation as an artist began with the mixed "heritage" of his family. His mother taught him racism, but he learned something different from his African American foster mother, Virginia Prentiss. Childhood poverty, shifting racial allegiances, and a "psychology of want" helped construct the many "houses" of race and identity he imagined. Reesman also examines London's socialism, his study of Darwin and Jung, and the illnesses he suffered in the South Seas. With new readings of The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden, and many other works, such as the explosive Pacific stories, Reesman reveals that London employed many of the same literary tropes of race used by African American writers of his period: the slave narrative, double-consciousness, the tragic mulatto, and ethnic diaspora. Hawaii seemed to inspire his most memorable visions of a common humanity.
InAuthor Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in ...London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" toThe People of the Abyss.
The Jack London who emerges in the pages ofAuthor Under Sailis a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time.
Author Under Sailis a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.
Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. ...A onetime child laborer, London led a life of poverty in the Gilded Age before rising to worldwide acclaim for stories, novels, and essays designed to hasten the social, economic, and political advance of America. In this major reinterpretation of London's career, Tichi examines how the beloved writer leveraged his written words as a force for the future.Tracing the arc of London's work from the late 1800s through the 1910s, Tichi profiles the writer's allies and adversaries in the cities, on the factory floor, inside prison walls, and in the farmlands. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals.The enhanced e-book edition ofJack Londonfeatures significant archival motion picture footage.
In Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London,
1902-1907 , Jay Williams explores Jack London's necessity to
illustrate the inner workings of his vast imagination. In this
second installment of ...a three-volume biography, Williams captures
the life of a great writer expressed though his many creative
works, such as The Call of the Wild and White
Fang , as well as his first autobiographical memoir, The
Road , some of his most significant contributions to the
socialist cause, and notable uncompleted works. During this time,
London became one of the most famous authors in America, perhaps
even the author with the highest earnings, as he prepared to become
an equally famous international writer. Author Under Sail
documents London's life in both a biographical and writerly
fashion, depicting the importance of his writing experiences as his
career followed a trajectory similar to America's from 1876 to
1916. The underground forces of London's narratives were shaped by
a changing capitalist society, media outlets, racial issues,
increases in women's rights, and advancements in national power.
Williams factors in these elements while exploring London's deeply
conflicted relationship with his own authorial inner life. In
London's work, the imagination is figured as a ghost or as a
ghostlike presence, and the author's personas, who form a dense
population among his characters, are portrayed as haunted or
troubled in some way. Along with examining the functions and works
of London's exhaustive imagination, Williams takes a critical look
at London's ability to tell his stories to wide arrays of
audiences, stitching incidents together into coherent wholes so
they became part of a raconteur's repertoire. Author Under
Sail provides a multidimensional examination of the life of a
crucial American storyteller and essayist.
Wright talks about the sources of photographs in Jack London's The People of the Abyss. London offered The People of the Abyss, his eyewitness account of life in London's East End, as proof that he ...could "deliver the goods". He mentioned the research he had done and the material he had gathered. He also maintained that he had taken "two-thirds of the photographs with (his) own camera". London did not specify whether he had in mind the American edition of The People of the Abyss, published by the Macmillan Co (New York, 1903); the English edition, published by Isbister and Co Ltd (London, 1903); or the Wilshire's Magazine serialization.
While literature may originate either in a state of isolation or social immersion alone, literary artists have long moved back and forth along a continuum between the two to produce their works. Jack ...London's 1912 novel The Scarlet Plague is significant for the ways in which it sheds light on the relationship between quarantine, social immersion, and literary composition through its interplay of memory, inversion, and narrative authority. The novel achieves this primarily by juxtaposing, distancing, and bridging the distance between complementary opposites, such as remembering and forgetting, civilized and wild, and storyteller and audience. Jack London's The Scarlet Plague stands as an important work in the field of pandemic literature, informing and reframing those that have preceded it, while continuing to influence and inspire those that follow. In doing so, it alerts readers and practitioners of literary art to the dangers, mysteries and wonders of quarantine.
Given the notoriously violent, tooth-andclaw subject matter of McCarthy's fiction, complimented by McCarthy's famous statement in "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction," his 1992 New York Times ...interview with Richard B. Woodward, that "There is no such thing as life without bloodshed," McCarthy's indebtedness to the tradition of literary naturalism would seem to be self-evident, and yet Frye's monograph is remarkably the first book-length endeavor to undertake an influence study of this kind. Child of God, when held up to the light that the influence of American literary naturalism can shed, yields McCarthy's debt to naturalist works from the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth that focused on atavistic themes and, not least, the figure of the brute. After the first three "regional" novels (always a reductive phrase!) capturing the wilderness and the fecund rural nature of East Tennessee, McCarthy's Knoxville novel deals with nature writ large within the modern urban space rather than within an environment of rocks and stones and trees. Suttree uncovers "the brutality of economic indifference as class confronts class in a battle for resources that brooks no argument or moral principle outside the game of life" (58); nevertheless, like all of McCarthy s works, Suttree invests in what Frye terms "romantic naturalism," that is, a "manifestation of a material realm of evocative mystery and cosmological implication" (59), be it in the subtle brotherhood of McAnally Flats, Suttree s tortured soul, or this same anti-hero's devotion to the living.
Before any wolf packs were established in Oregon, state officials convened a group of stakeholders to come up with a plan to manage the wolves’ impending arrival. In a chapter titled “Depredation” ...she explains that ranchers are often criticized for “their management practices once their animals are released onto summer grazing allotments on public lands,” which may suggest her alignment with those who wholly support the wolves’ return. For all its admirable depth into the topic of wolves in Oregon, Collared only slightly lacks in breadth of coverage about wolves in the West more broadly. Since wolves dispersed naturally into Oregon from surrounding states, there are a number of references both in the text and in footnotes to wolves and wolf management in neighboring states.
This article builds on the theorization of the Bildungsroman as advanced by Nancy Armstrong and Franco Moretti. This narrative form is particularly suited to the expression of American ...self-formation, which ever since the formalization of the "birth of the nation" and "pursuit of happiness" ethos via the Declaration of Independence (1776), has elided labor, work ethic, and the interminable pursuit of fame and fortune with the formation of character and a secure identity. Since their inception, YouTube and Instagram (2005 and 2010, respectively) have steadily grown to replace traditional forms of media and entertainment, and in turn, inscribed a new form of digital celebrity known as the "influencer." While recent research by Chris Stokel-Walker, amongst others, has analyzed this phenomenon in relation to the displacement of television, we see an even more pertinent connection with the novel. In particular, the narrative form of the Bildungsroman can be seen to be restructured in video form, constituting a uniquely twenty-first century narrative of development in which the influencer can be read as both author and hero. We term this process digital-bildungs. These narratives, we argue, reproduce the conventions of the classical Bildungsroman in a way that is conservative in its rehashing of the narratological imperatives of courtship, marriage, reproduction, and land acquisition, yet consistent with the allure of twenty-first century technology, luxury, and glamour.
