The social, philosophic, and psychic landscapes in four major novels by Jack London, 1988

This thesis examines and evaluates four major novels by Jack London as they relate to the author's aesthetic philosophy and prophetic vision. The works are: The Call of the Wild. White Fang. The Iron Heel and Martin Eden. These novels were chosen because of their correlating themes and parallel imagery. The "Introduction" is an overview. It sets forth the basic tenets of London's philosophy while probing the nineteenth-century belief in the American Dream, a patriotic, bourgeois dream of success, power, and respectibility, in conjunction with the popular superman concept, an offshoot of hero-worshipping in Victorian literature, the admiration of great men who had often become legendary figures. Chapter One, a chronological listing of several nineteenth-century influences on London!an philosophy, discusses the author's introduction to the concepts of Darwin, Spencer, Marx and Nietzsche. In addition, it Is emphasized here that Industrialization is a significant influence also, one that touches upon each of the four basic doctrines of Londonian thought. Chapter Two is a detailed comparison of two of the Northland Saigas, The Call of the Wild and White Fang. Certain elements of these animal stories are traced to antiquity. These stories are largely measured by the standards set by Aesop earlier. Therefore, several links to the Aesopian convention are established in this evaluation of London1s animal stories, human allegories based upon Aesop*s Fables. Kipling is important here also. Chapter Three evaluates one selection from London*s socialist writings and a piece from a collection of his autobiographical fiction, The Iron Heel and Martin Eden respectively. The first part of this chapter relates character to content, form and point of view. The second section is focused upon the thematic content of both works. The psychological dream imagery and water symbolism that London employs in the development of his characters are also discussed here. Chapter Four concludes the study. It summarizes and restates factual material, while attempting to explain why London�s prophetic vision and themes of violence retain such a large degree of accuracy and pertinence in the twentieth century

Book Reviews

Charles Olson: Call Him Ishmael (Paul Christensen) (Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California)Charles Olson: The Scholar\u27s Art (Robert von Hallberg) (Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California)Olson\u27s Push: Origin, Black Mountain and Recent American Poetry (Sherman Paul) (Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff, University of Southern California)The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Wolfgang Iser) (Reviewed by Wallace Martin, University of Toledo)The Failure of Criticism (Eugene Goodheart) (Reviewed by Michael Grimaud, Wellesley College)What is Literature? (Paul Hernadi) (Reviewed by Michael Grimaud, Wellesley College)The Sceptical Vision of Moliere (Robert McBride) (Reviewed by Laurence Romero, Villanova University)Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature 1610-1652 (Ian Maclean) (Reviewed by Laurence Romero, Villanova University)The Subterfuge of Art, Language and the Romantic Tradition (Michael Ragussis) (Reviewed by Peter J. Manning, University of Southern California)Dickens and Phiz (Michael Steig) (Reviewed by Judith Wilt, Boston College)Dickens and Charity (Norris Pope) (Reviewed by Judith Wilt, Boston College)Nikolai Leskov: The Man and His Art (Hugh McLean) (Reviewed by Thomas Eekman, University of California, Los Angeles)Always Merry and Bright: The Life of Henry Miller, An Unauthorized Biography (Jay Martin) (Reviewed by Kingsley Widmer, San Diego State University)Mindscreen: Bergman, Godard, and First-Person Film (Bruce F. Kawin) (Reviewed by Joseph A. Gomez, Wayne State University)Script Into Performance: A Structuralist View of Play Production (Richard Hornby) (Reviewed by William I. Oliver, University of California, Berkeley)Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading of the Last Novels of H. G. Wells (Robert Bloom) (Reviewed by John R. Reed, Wayne State University)Melville\u27s Short Fiction, 1853-1856 (William B. Dillingham) (Reviewed by Henry Golemba, Wayne State University)Jack London: The Man, The Writer, The Rebel (Robert Baltrop) (Reviewed by Colin Cass, Wayne State University

A living lump of appetites\u27: the reinvention of the primitive in naturalist and modernist literature

When we consider the historical and cultural events that mark the latenineteenth through early twentieth centuries, we discover a growing fear about the vanishing Anglo-Saxon. This response to the non-Anglo-Saxon or primitive differs significantly, however, from earlier, more romantic definitions and philosophies wherein the primitive is considered a positive alternative to civilization. While earlier eras conceive of the primitive as positive, these eras\u27 judgments change as one considers turn of the twentieth-century American literature. It is this reassessment of the primitive that is the focus of my study. am particularly interested in how these ruminations about the primitive are codified scientifically and developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this dissertation, I examine selected literature written during the naturalist and modernist movements in order to determine the degree to which these texts advance theories about the primitive that participate in an agenda of fear and loathing. Pivotal to my study is a trajectory of the primitive that shows its many forms, its changes and contradictions, and the degree to which naturalist and modernist texts draw upon earlier romantic images of the primitive and transmogrify them

Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the Crowd

While the work of Pound and Lewis has often been read as the expression of 'high' literary culture's desire to erect a barrier against the incursions of the masses, this thesis argues that if we place their work in the context of the early twentieth-century dialogue on the crowd, the relationship between modernism and the masses . appears more complex. For both authors, their engagement with the apparition of the crowd, and the lessons they believed artists must learn from crowd culture, were key to their development. Chapter 1 positions Pound's Lustra in the context of continental and American ideas about crowds and argues that this collection is best understood as an ambiguous response to a new world where engagement with crowds is essential. Chapter 2 argues that Lewis's early texts should likewise be read in the context of the crowd, and that his experiments of Blast can be read as attempts to show readers how to master the emerging 'crowd-mind'. Chapter 3 examines the impact of the war crowds, and shows how Lewis engages with post-war London where ideas about the death of the ,crowd had taken on an immediate cultural urgency. It argues that, as particular visions of crowd-being faded from the political scene, the crowd, too, faded from the focus of literary modernism. The thesis cohcludes by speculating on the fate and future-if any-of crowd writing. An appendix presents a text of Wyndham Lewis's unpublished 'Cantelman: Crowd Master' prepared from the manuscripts in Cornell University Library

The Inverted City: London and the Constitution of Homosexuality, 1885-1914

PhDThis thesis examines the ways in which male homosexuality came to be closely associated with urban life between 1885 and 1914. It focuses on London and argues that particular aspects of the city's history and reputation were integral to the social, sexual and political aspects of emerging homosexual identities. The thesis draws on literature, sexology, the largely overlooked diaries and scrapbooks of George Ives (an early campaigner for homosexual law reform), and previously unexamined newspaper reports. The first chapter outlines changes to London during the period, and examines the intensification of concerns about poverty, degeneracy, decadence and sexual profligacy. The chapters that follow show how these changes and concerns informed understanding and expressions of homosexuality. Chapter two looks at the history of homosexuality in London, and indicates the significance of urban change in shaping patterns of behaviour. Chapter three examines legislation, the ways in which men were policed and surveyed in London, and newspaper accounts of court cases. Chapter four shows how sexology strengthened and elaborated this connection between homosexuality and the city. The last two chapters consider material written by, and explicitly or implicitly concerning, men involved in homosexual activity. Chapter five discusses how the city provided an ideal locale for a decadent understanding of desire, and the final chapter focuses on writing that attempted to counter this decadence with an appeal to Hellenism and pastoralism. It shows how the city was envisaged as a locus for the formation of political and sexual identities that might initiate a process of social change

Bio/Techno/Homo: a critical history of the human in Anglo-American science fiction

Science fiction (‘SF’) is often understood as a literature of radical possibilities—but to what extent do SF writers break the mould of humanist thought that has informed much of the western literary and cultural tradition? In this thesis, I will examine the concept of the ‘human’ as it has been incorporated into works of Anglo-American SF from the nineteenth century to the 1970s. By ‘human’, I mean the diverse sets of beliefs, ideas, and qualities attached, consciously or unconsciously, to the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanity’ in these texts. More specifically, I will examine the diverse ways that SF writers have narrativised the human in relation to technology and the natural world. As has been argued by a number of prominent critics, including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Cary Wolfe, and Jacques Derrida, attitudes and relationships towards technological systems and material nature have been fundamental in determining the nature and meaning of the ‘human’ in western culture. These critics form part of the field of posthumanism, a branch of critical studies which has been centrally concerned with unearthing, investigating, and challenging what precisely is meant by the terms ‘human’ and ‘humanity’. Deploying a model of posthumanism as a hermeneutical principle for deconstructing the human figure in literary SF, I will stage the argument that, despite the radical ontological and epistemological possibilities generated by SF’s speculative framework, SF texts have been reluctant to embrace models of subjectivity and embodiment that move beyond the narrow humanist tenets of scientific rationalism, biological and material transcendence, teleological progressivism, and instrumentalist views of nature. Through an analysis of a range of human ‘archetypes’ found throughout the history of the genre, I will argue that SF has instead consistently deployed a liminal conception of the human that is ambiguously situated between ‘assimilative’ humanist and ‘transformative’ posthumanist conceptions of the human and nonhuman subject

‘I could almost believe in God’: the evolution of American theology in American literary naturalism

This dissertation is about the prevalence of religious themes in American literary naturalism, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. The centrality of themes such as the indifference of nature and the struggle for survival are common to naturalism, owing to its close association with post-Enlightenment and post-Darwinian advances in science and philosophy. From a contemporary perspective, where science and religion often appear as oppositional explanations for life and its development, it becomes all too easy to assume that those authors associated with naturalism represented religion in limited ways, or with a spirit of antagonism. However, I demonstrate that religion occupies a central position in naturalism. I argue that the religious themes of Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sinclair Lewis are reflections of nineteenth and early twentieth-century theological and cultural histories that saw American Protestantism adjusting to a post-Darwinian and post-Enlightenment context through a process of liberalisation. Whilst I do not set out to form an overarching theory of religion in naturalism, I do argue that the naturalists consistently explore the veracity of the Bible, the humanity of Christ, the eschatological promise of life after death, the socio-economic and socio-political implications of Christ’s teaching, and the concept of original sin. In conclusion, I note that both the Great Depression and post-9/11 America saw a return to naturalism as a mode of representation. I therefore also explore how twentieth- and twenty-first century naturalists continued to incorporate into their works the religious themes explored in the works of the earlier generation of naturalists. The naturalists were, and perhaps continue to be, scientists, philosophers, and non-conventional theologians. Religion and naturalism coexist in a complex relationship that ebbs and flows between orthodoxy and liberalism, but never do they deny the right for the other to exist

Folder 2, Pamphlets, 1904-1912 and undated.

Box 3, Folder 2Born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1869, Thomas Aloysius Hickey arrived in America in 1892. Hickey joined the Socialist Labor party and the Knights of Labor in 1893 and became an ardent speaker, organizer, and writer, as well as private secretary to Eugene V. Debs. In 1900, he left the Socialist Labor Party and went on to cocreate the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and helped arrange several machinist strikes in New Jersey, which led to his blacklisting by employers. Moving to Butte, Montana, Hickey joined the Western Federation of Miners and helped recruit for the Socialist party.In 1911, he moved to Hallettsville, Texas, and started a weekly newspaper called The Rebel. Over time, Hickey became a prominent figure in the socialist movement and the slogan of his paper became the official slogan of the Socialist party in Texas. He served as the socialist candidate for lieutenant governor in 1912 and was married to Clara E. Boeer that same year. The government suppressed The Rebel in 1917 under the Espionage Act and in 1918, the Nonpartisan League fired Hickey as an organizer.In October 1919, he and other socialists organized the National Workers Drilling and Production Company. Hickey continued writing, serving as an advertising manager of the Desdemona Oil News and a correspondent for fourteen more newspapers such as the Texas Oil World and the Independent Oil and Financial Reporter. Withdrawing from the company in 1920, he moved to a farm near Stamford, Texas, and was publishing Tom Hickey's Magazine until his death on May 7, 1925, of throat cancer.The Handbook of Texas has published a more in-depth online biography of Thomas Aloysius Hickey at http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/online/search.htmlThe collection contains correspondence, printed material, news clippings, financial and legal material, literary productions, and scrapbook material. The bulk of the collection is correspondence, including letters from Hickey's readers and from Socialist leaders such as Theodore Debs. The printed materials include newsletters, pamphlets, periodicals, and circulars. Principal subjects of this collection are the Socialist Party, World War I, and pacifism.Conservation Note: In 1985 and 1986, a large number of the papers in this collection were encapsulated within Mellinex polyester film and/or deacidified using Wei I'o aerosol solution. Those pages that were not treated remain fragile and brittle. Also, some of the double-sided tape used for the encapsulation is either coming loose or sticking to other pages. Additionally, the two volume German medical book set is in very fragile condition, with the binding falling apart and pages loose. The covers are also fading and deteriorating

The aesthetic diversity of American proletarian fiction

Almost as soon as a certain movement in early twentieth-century American literature began to be labeled proletarian, numerous literary critics defined the genre as propagandistic, formulaic, and prescribed by a hegemonic and totalitarian American Communist Party. Recently, scholars of 1930s leftist literature have challenged previous dismissals of proletarianism by noting the diversity of participants and the complexity of individual works. Frequently, however, too much emphasis is placed upon the Communist Party, shared political and literary projects, and temporal parameters, all of which would suggest that proletarianism was an isolated phenomenon within the history of American literature. This study reveals that the major proponents of American proletarian literature portrayed the movement as the successor to progressive and radical tendencies throughout the history of American literature. Furthermore, during the 1930s proletarianism was a term open to debate, one whose advocates presented vastly different definitions. Similarly, those novelists whom contemporary critics most often labeled proletarian, although they shared a support of labor and socialism, utilized disparate and frequently experimental techniques and held varied positions toward the Communist Party

Naturalism, the new journalism, and the tradition of the modern American fact-based homicide novel

With the 1965 publication of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote announced the creation of a new literary genre: the "nonfiction novel." Because Capote's book inspired a succession of "copycats," many critics have traced a genre from it. But Capote's book is the culmination, not the commencement, of using fictional techniques to write about real murder cases. Capote's deterministic treatment of the protagonist, his use of reporting techniques, and his focus on the murderers (rather than the victims, police, or plot) reveal the book's Naturalistic roots. In Cold Blood's earliest ancestors in American literature are Frank Norris's McTeague and Theodore Dreiser' s An American Tragedy. American Naturalists such as Norris and Dreiser were directly influenced by Emile Zola and the natural philosophy of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. For generations, Naturalism influenced authors of fact-based homicide novels, among them William Faulkner (Light in August), James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), Richard Wright (Native Son), and Meyer Levin (Compulsion). The writer of the fact-based homicide novel characterizes the killer in such a way that the reader understands the circumstances which led to the crime and sympathizes with the protagonist