Fiction: 1900 to the 1930s

There continues to be significant scholarship on some of the major figures in the first part of the 20th century, especially high modernists Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes, and authors of the Harlem Renaissance, including Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, and Nella Larsen. Important new collections on Jack London and Stein and a special issue of New Centennial Review on the fiction of W. E. B. Du Bois highlight a wide variety of their writings. Authors who have not received much scholarly study are being rediscovered, including humorist Irvin S. Cobb, Pulitzer Prize winner Margaret Wilson, lawyer Clarence Darrow, and Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of Charlie Chan. There is also considerable interest in novels that revolve around racial anxiety, such as those written by Pauline Hopkins, Winnifred Eaton, and Rudolph Fisher.

i Naturalism

Substantial work is being done in Jack London studies, including a new biography, an MLA book on teaching London's works, and several articles. Cecilia Tichi's Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America (No. Car.) approaches London as a public intellectual "through a bifocal lens that alloys his literary skills with his sociopolitical passions." London was an avowed socialist who championed progressive reform and who wrote and spoke against the injustices of the Gilded Age, including child labor, the waste of war, harsh and unsafe working conditions, cruel punishment and incarceration, and an environment that American Literary Scholarship (2015) doi 10.1215/00659142-3826177 © 2017 by Duke University Press was devastated by greed. Tichi writes about London in light of social and political problems of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and how he communicated about the need for a new social order in his fiction, his essays, and his lectures.

Kenneth K. Brandt and Jeanne Campbell Reesman have edited a valuable collection on teaching London's fiction and nonfiction in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Jack London (MLA). They start with a materials section—an overview of editions, biographies, reference works, and literary criticism—to place the essays in context. The approaches section contains essays on intellectual and cultural contexts; class, politics, and ideology; intersections of race and gender; and classroom contexts. Among the thoughtful contributions are Sara S. Hodson's "Jack London, Celebrity" (pp. 25–35) and Barry Menikoff's "Martin Eden: Portrait of the Artist, American Style" (pp. 52–58), which examine the success of Martin Eden and how it turned London from a "mere" author into a larger-than-life celebrity, while Debbie López and María DeGuzmán's "Teaching Contradictory Representations of Gender, Race, and Ethnicity in Martin Eden" (pp. 112–19) discuss what students can learn as they analyze some of the ideological dualisms in the text. Some of the theorists who inform London's writing, from Herbert Spencer to Charles Darwin, are found in Keith Newlin's "Teaching Ideas in The Sea-Wolf" (pp. 36–43), Kenneth K. Brandt's "An Evolutionary Approach to The Call of the Wild" (pp. 44–51), and Jay Williams's "Jack London and Socialism" (pp. 59–68). The dystopian The Iron Heel is the focus of Paul Lauter's "Teaching The Iron Heel" (pp. 69–76), which examines the challenges of its structure, and Aaron Shaheen's "Religion, Rationality, and the Course of History in Jack London's The Iron Heel" (pp. 77–84), which discusses the novel through faith-based epistemologies. Two of the most popular novels for discussion in these essays are the frequently taught The Sea-Wolf and The Call of the Wild. Anita Duneer's "Androgyny and Sexuality in The Sea-Wolf" (pp. 93–101) considers the female presence in sea literature, while Jeff Jaeckle's "Representations of Gender in Two Versions of The Sea-Wolf" (pp. 137–41) considers gender in the novel and the 1941 film. Michael Lundblad's "The Nature of the Beast in The Call of the Wild" (pp. 149–58) discusses the novel through the lens of animal studies, while Alicia Mischa Renfroe's "An Old Favorite in a New Context: Teaching London's The Call of the Wild in a Law and Literature Class...