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The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture

2013; Oxford University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/isle/ist097

1759-1090

Ryan Hediger,

Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature

Picture iconic Tarzan swinging through the jungle. He may seem plainly legible amid his era's sharpened attention to animality. But as Michael Lundblad shows, neither this figure nor his jungle is a simple, natural fact. Nor are they transparent signifiers. Instead, they grow out of a tangled, complex mesh of cultural anxieties about the differences among human “races” and animals. Tarzan thus borrows from and helps to found a powerful set of ideas about “the jungle,” also studied here in texts such as Jack London's The Call of the Wild, Henry James's short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” and Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Lundblad argues that “this discourse is more recent, complicated, and significant than current scholarship tends to suggest” (2). His book's six chapters—plus an introduction and a conclusion—proceed in three parts: “Epistemology of the Jungle,” “Survival of the Fittest Market,” and “The Evolutions of Race.” Together, they attend to the “explosion of literary and cultural texts focused on animality within a narrow time period, between 1894 and 1914, in the United States” (3). That temporal and geographical focus enables the book's method and its successes, permitting Lundblad to go beyond more general arguments about animality.