- The Oxford Handbook of Jack London ed. by Jay Williams
Jay Williams has put together a magnificent volume packed with terrific new readings of Jack London’s intense life and career. It is exciting to hear from the leading London scholars grouped together here, as well as from the numerous emerging scholars setting new directions in London studies. The former is a legacy to celebrate, but the latter is fresh evidence of London’s enduring call in American literary studies and in the classroom. The Oxford Handbook to Jack London is a must for every library and scholar’s shelf and should be regarded as reflecting critical views as well as teaching approaches and student preferences, right up to the present moment. Williams has contributed a lifetime of outstanding research, publication, and leadership in Jack London studies, particularly in his editorship of the Jack London Journal and the first volume of his three-volume biography, Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London, 1893–1902 (2014). Contained in these pages are some brief and lengthy analyses of London’s life and his works, and the range and diversity of point of critical view and focus is remarkable.
Williams has excelled in his choice of experts on certain topics. The volume presents a vast opportunity for dialogue with and among the thirty-five essayists and their topics. Among these, some stand out: Cecelia Tichi on “The Facts of Life and Literature,” Kenneth K. Brandt’s “‘Never Had Much Difficulty’: Jack London, George Brett, and the Macmillan Company,” Joseph McAleer on “Jack London’s International Reputation,” Sara S. Hodson on “The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital [End Page 186] of Poverty,” John Hay with “Jack London’s Sci-Fi Finale,” Paul Durica with “‘The Ragged Edge of Nonentity’: Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp,” Donna Campbell’s “Women’s Rights, Women’s Lives,” and Amy Tucker’s “The Illustration of Jack London.” The early essays in the volume tend to emphasize London’s family and his publishing life, especially in serials and newspaper war reporting. Next, beginning with Dan Wichlan’s essay on “The Essays, Articles, and Lectures of Jack London,” the emphasis becomes genre, with a bit of science, socialism, and atavism of the day. With “The Valley of the Moon: The Quest for Love, Land, and a Home,” by Susan Nuernberg, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, and Allison Archer, the essays turn to animal studies, various reform movements and impulses reflected in London’s work and then the blurring of gender—for example, in illustrations of his works, which Amy Tucker examines.
Tichi’s essay launches right into a very detailed, well-argued, and sensitive assessment of class within London’s rejection of supernatural and religious ideas in favor of factual, or as called in literary studies, realism with its “authentic material facts” (27). Brandt presents what must be regarded as the most masterful and to date most authoritative word on London’s relationship with Macmillan editor George Brett. McAleer’s brilliant scholarship and astonishing detail show a great knowledge of sources and provide a new international perspective on London. In his conclusion, drawing on London’s admiration of Orwell, France, and Borges, McAleer illustrates that London’s work remains popular among intellectuals and readers all over the world. Hodson brilliantly outlines what she calls the “genre of charitable writing” (278) at the turn of the century and its relationship to naturalism, with much insight into London’s point of view in The People of the Abyss and his sources, as well as comparisons to Crane, Gissing, and Maugham.
Hay, a new but consequential voice on London, views his work through the lens of Western traditions and the innovations of modernity. In his 1903 essay “The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction,” London linked his work to that of Poe, Bierce, Stevenson, Haggard, Kipling, and Wells. But Hay points out that London’s “literature of the American frontier was not his portrayal of canine consciousness...