The Oxford Handbook of Jack London (Oxford Handbooks) - Hardcover

Williams, Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199315175 ISBN 13: 9780199315178

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2017

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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

Review

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0199315175
• ISBN 13: 9780199315178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 674