Rereading Jack London

by Cassuto, Leonard; Reesman, Jeanne Campbell; Labor, Earle

• ISBN13: 9780804735162
• ISBN10: 0804735166
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-07-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Jack London has long been recognized as one of the most colorful figures in American literature. He is America's most widely translated author (into more than eighty languages), and although his works have been neglected until recently by academic critics in the United States, he is finally winning recognition as a major figure in American literary history. The breadth and depth of new critical study of London's work in recent decades attest to his newfound respectability. London criticism has moved beyond a traditional concerns of realism and naturalism as well as beyond the timeworn biographical focus to engage such theoretical approaches as race, gender, class, post-structuralism, and new historicism. The range and intellectual energy of the essays collected here give the reader a new sense of London's richness and variety, especially his treatment of diverse cultures. Having in the past focused more on London's personal "world," we are now afforded an opportunity to look more closely at his art and the numerous worlds it uncovers.

Author Biography

Leonard Cassuto is Associate Professor of English at Fordham University. Jeanne Campbell Reesman is Professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
The Works of Jack London	xv
Introduction: Jack London, a Representative Man	1	(9)
Leonard Cassuto
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
Commitment and Practice: The Authorship of Jack London	10	(15)
James Williams
``Congested Mails'': Buck and Jack's ``Call''	25	(21)
Jonathan Auerbach
Ishi and Jack London's Primitives	46	(9)
Charles L. Crow
Gazing at Royalty: Jack London's The People of the Abyss and the Emergence of American Imperialism	55	(20)
Robert Peluso
Power, Gender, and Ideological Discourse in The Iron Heel	75	(17)
Francis Shor
Sea Change in The Sea-Wolf	92	(18)
Sam S. Baskett
Making a Heterosexual Man: Gender, Sexuality, and Narrative in the Fiction of Jack London	110	(20)
Scott Derrick
Social Darwinism, Gender, and Humor in Adventure	130	(11)
Clarice Stasz
``The Way Our People Came'': Citizenship, Capitalism, and Racial Difference in The Valley of the Moon	141	(17)
Christopher Hugh Gair
``Zone-Conquerors'' and ``White Devils'': The Contradictions of Race in the Works of Jack London	158	(14)
Andrew J. Furer
Political Leprosy: Jack London the Kama`aina and Koolau the Hawaiian	172	(20)
James Slagel
Historical Discourses in Jack London's ``Shin Bones''	192	(12)
Tanya Walsh
The Myth of Hope in Jack London's ``The Red One''	204	(13)
Lawrence I. Berkove
Afterword: The Representative Man as Writer/Hero	217	(10)
Earle Labor
Notes	227	(52)
Index	279