“In the Thick of It”: The (Meta)Discourse of Jack London’s Russo-Japanese War Correspondence

This article analyzes London’s work as a war correspondent during the early phase of the Russo-Japanese War as something other than simply an account of his experiences as a Western correspondent. I make the case that London’s war writing attempts to meta-discursively problematize many of the typical dimensions of war correspondence as it was practiced and represented in the “yellow press” at the close of the nineteenth century. Whereas other war correspondents often attempted to reify various similar ideas concerning war and the role of the correspondent through a writing practice that habituates an overall displacement of its discursive contingencies, London works to foreground such things in much of his Russo-Japanese War correspondence.