The Oxford Handbook of Jack London

by Jay Williams

Overview

London's first-hand engagement with the world—the process of becoming and maintaining himself as a citizen of the world—helps define the kind of writing he produced. It is insufficient now to call him a naturalist writer if his principal concern was to reflect and represent, not the usual fare of violence and natural forces that we as literary theorists have used to periodize London's work, but rather something larger, more indeterminant, contemporary. The word modern appears often in the pages of this handbook, and though it is not new to call London a modernist, the sheer weight of the scholarship in this present volume that attests to this alternative designation gives it a thorough grounding that previous attempts lacked. London called his times the Machine Age, not just to underscore the rapidity of modern life and its new mechanization, but also to highlight the need for a new social and economic order. The purpose of this handbook is to honor him as a representative American writer of the age as he understood it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199315178
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/02/2017
Series:	Oxford Handbooks
Pages:	674
Product dimensions:	9.90(w) x 7.00(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Jay Williams is Senior Managing Editor for Critical Inquiry and the founding editor of the Jack London Journal.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction
Jay Williams
1. Life on the Pacific Rim: The Ideology of The Overland Monthly
Jay Williams
2. The Facts of Life and Literature
Cecelia Tichi
3. Family, Friends, and Mentors
Clarice Stasz
4. Jack London, Marriage, and Divorce
Clare Virginia Eby
5. "Never Had Much Difficulty": Jack London, George Brett, and the Macmillan Company
Kenneth K. Brandt
6. Jack London's International Reputation
Joseph McAleer
7. "The Feels": Jack London and the New Mass Cultural Public Sphere
Michael Millner
8. Jack London, War, and the Journalism That Acts
Karen Roggenkamp
9. "In the Thick of It": The (Meta)Discourse of Jack London's Russo-Japanese War Correspondence
Kevin R. Swafford
10. "Come Down from the Mountain Top and Join the Fray": Jack London's Role in the Mexican Revolution
Lawrence D. Taylor
11. The Essays, Articles and Lectures of Jack London
Daniel J. Wichlan
12. Jack London as Playwright
George Adams
13. Jack London as Poet
George Adams
14. The Atavistic Nightmare: Memory and Recapitulation in Jack London's Ghost and Fantasy Stories
Michael Newton
15. Darwin's Anachronisms: Liberalism and Conservative Temporality in The Son of the Wolf
Stephen J. Mexal
16. The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty
Sara S. Hodson
17. Canine Narration
Loren Glass
18. Making Sense of Jack London's Confusion of Genres in The Sea-Wolf
Per Serritslev Petersen
19. The Iron Heel and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel
Kathy Knapp
20. "Mix According to Formula": Martin Eden and the Question of Genre
Christopher Gair
21. Burning Daylight
Tony Williams
22. Jack London's Sci-Fi Finale
John Hay
23. The Valley of the Moon: Quest for Love, Land, and a Home
Susan Nuernberg, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, and Alison Archer
24. "A Curious Sort of Book": Jack London's The Star Rover and the Politics of Prison Reform
Susan I. Gatti
25. Cherry, Unfinished Business: Race, Class, and the American Empire
Lawrence Phillips
26. Sex and Science in Jack London's America
Layne Parish Craig
27. From Atavistic Gutter-Wolves to Anglo-Saxon Wolf's: Evolution and Technology in Jack London's Urban Industrial Modernity
Agnes Malinowska
28. A Bestiary from the Age of Jack London
Michael Lundblad
29. "The Ragged Edge of Nonentity": Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp, 1878-1907
Paul Durica
30. Jack London and Physical Culture
Paul Baggett
31. The Sovereign Logic of Jack London's Sea Stories
Hank Scotch
32. "See Things in New Ways": Jack London, Socialism, and the Conversionary Model of Politics
Howard Horwitz
33. Jack London, Suffering, and the Ideal of Masculine Toughness
Leonard Cassuto
34. Women's Rights, Women's Lives
Donna Campbell
35. Blurred Lines: The Illustration of Jack London
Amy Tucker

Editorial Reviews

"Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers." —J. W. Miller, CHOICE

From the Publisher