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  • Fiction:1900 to the 1930s
  • Sally E. Parry

Naturalism is well represented in scholarship this year with an Oxford handbook on Jack London and an issue of Women's Studies focusing on the work of Charmian Kittredge London. There are a number of new and important additions to African American scholarship, including a history of the African American novel, two books of African American ecocriticism, a book of essays on James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a book on maternal metaphors in African American women's writing, and the publication of a newly discovered novel by Claude McKay. A substantial biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a collection of Ring Lardner's essays and columns, and a well-researched book on war narratives in the long U.S. modernism are also highlights this year. Brooks E. Hefner's The Word on the Street: The American Language of Vernacular Modernism (Virginia) crosses all the categories in this chapter as he makes connections between "the revolutions of modernism and the revolutionary nature of American street slang." Looking specifically at what he calls "vernacular modernists," Hefner calls for rethinking modernist boundaries to value those texts that use nonstandard "American" language, including ethnic and working-class voices. The book demonstrates a wide reading of texts of the 1920s and includes sustained discussions of H. L. Mencken, Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Rudolph Fisher, and Claude McKay. [End Page 269]

i Naturalism

The Oxford Handbook of Jack London is an invaluable addition to London scholarship. In the introduction, editor Jay Williams conceptualizes London broadly as a "writer and denizen of the Pacific Rim" and a "citizen of the world," who developed his authorial identity through his work and travels. The 35 essays, written by an impressive group of scholars, cover both London's life and his art, as well as his politics. There are several essays on his journalism, including his work on the British poor in The People of the Abyss, as well as his coverage of the Russo-Japanese War and the Mexican Revolution. London is discussed as a poet, a playwright, a lecturer, a socialist, and an advocate for prison reform. There are essays on many of the major works—The Sea-Wolf, Martin Eden, Burning Daylight, and The Iron Heel—as well as on his ghost stories, his sea stories, his science-fiction tales, his canine stories, and other adventure stories of the Klondike. His work is also contextualized through the lenses of physical culture, masculinity, race, class, and gender, including how his ideas on these topics shifted over the course of his writing life.

Women's Studies devoted an entire issue (46, iv) to London's wife, Charmian Kittredge London, edited by Amy Tucker. In most London scholarship Charmian has been discussed as his lover, his fellow adventurer, and, after his death, his promoter. This issue represents her from various perspectives, providing new biographical and bibliographical information and discussing her influence on her husband's writing, in which she often served as a model for his fictional heroines. There are critical studies on her writing, including two travel books, a two-volume biography of her husband, and parts of a previously unpublished log of their travels on the Dirigo.

Cara Erdheim Kilgallen's "Aging Athletes, Broken Bodies, and Disability in Jack London's Prizefighting Prose" (StAN 12: 200–19) investigates the tension between London's holding "eugenic sentiments of Anglo-Saxon superiority and reflecting socialist concerns for underprivileged people." Using the critical lens of disability studies, she argues that his prizefighting prose demonstrates the divide in American naturalism between social Darwinism and concern for the marginalized, defined as such because of race, class, or disability.

In "Toward a Genealogy of the American Zombie Novel: From Jack London to Colson Whitehead," pp. 98–119 in Kyle William Bishop and [End Page 270] Angela Tenga, eds., The Written Dead: Essays on the Literary Zombie (McFarland), Wylie Lenz argues that Jack London's The Scarlet Plague (1912) is one of the earliest examples of an American proto-zombie narrative with a manufactured apocalypse, a leveling of hierarchies, and living dead. London...

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