- The Oxford Handbook of Jack London
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Life on the Pacific Rim: The Ideology of The Overland Monthly
- The Facts of Life and Literature
- Family, Friends, Mentors
- Jack London, Marriage, and Divorce
- “Never Had Much Difficulty”: Jack London, George Brett, and the Macmillan Company
- Jack London’s International Reputation
- “The Feels”: Jack London and the New Mass Cultural Public Sphere
- Jack London, War, and the Journalism that Acts
- “In the Thick of It”: The (Meta)Discourse of Jack London’s Russo-Japanese War Correspondence
- “Come Down from the Mountain Top and Join the Fray”: Jack London’s Role in the Mexican Revolution
- The Essays, Articles, and Lectures of Jack London
- Jack London as Playwright
- Jack London as Poet
- The Atavistic Nightmare: Memory and Recapitulation in Jack London’s Ghost and Fantasy Stories
- Darwin’s Anachronisms: Liberalism and Conservative Temporality in The Son of the Wolf
- The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty
- Canine Narration
- Making Sense of Jack London’s Confusion of Genres in <i>The Sea-Wolf</i>
- <i>The Iron Heel</i> and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel
- “Mix According to Formula”: Martin Eden and the Question of Genre
- Burning Daylight
- Jack London’s Sci-Fi Finale
- The Valley of the Moon: Quest for Love, Land, and a Home
- “A Curious Sort of Book”: Jack London’s The Star Rover and the Politics of Prison Reform
- Cherry, Unfinished Business: Race, Class, and the American Empire
- Sex and Science in Jack London’s America
- From Atavistic Gutter-Wolves to Anglo-Saxon Wolf: Evolution and Technology in Jack London’s Urban Industrial Modernity
- A Bestiary from the Age of Jack London
- “The Ragged Edge of Nonentity”: Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp, 1878–1907
- Jack London and Physical Culture
- The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories
- “See Things in New Ways”: Jack London, Socialism, and the Conversionary Model of Politics
- Jack London, Suffering, and the Ideal of Masculine Toughness
- Women’s Rights, Women’s Lives
- Blurred Lines: The Illustration of Jack London
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Jack London is often pigeonholed as a literary naturalist, but his interests aligned with a science fiction tradition. Over the course of his career, London increasingly set his narratives in the ancient past and the distant future. These fictional temporal environments provided him with new vantage points with which to explore the political relationship between individualism and nationalism, an exploration that intensified in his later work. His little-known 1912 novella The Scarlet Plague, one of the earliest examples of postapocalyptic fiction, reimagined the western frontier in a new age. Its combination of a doomed heroic individual and a struggling Darwinian population set the tone for American postapocalyptic tales to come. An examination of this novella in its historical and compositional context reveals it to be a significant step forward in London’s literary development.
Keywords: science fiction, postapocalyptic, individualism, socialism, nationalism
John Hay is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, especially in its relation to the history of science. He is currently completing a book on postapocalyptic fantasies in antebellum American literature.
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- The Oxford Handbook of Jack London
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- Life on the Pacific Rim: The Ideology of The Overland Monthly
- The Facts of Life and Literature
- Family, Friends, Mentors
- Jack London, Marriage, and Divorce
- “Never Had Much Difficulty”: Jack London, George Brett, and the Macmillan Company
- Jack London’s International Reputation
- “The Feels”: Jack London and the New Mass Cultural Public Sphere
- Jack London, War, and the Journalism that Acts
- “In the Thick of It”: The (Meta)Discourse of Jack London’s Russo-Japanese War Correspondence
- “Come Down from the Mountain Top and Join the Fray”: Jack London’s Role in the Mexican Revolution
- The Essays, Articles, and Lectures of Jack London
- Jack London as Playwright
- Jack London as Poet
- The Atavistic Nightmare: Memory and Recapitulation in Jack London’s Ghost and Fantasy Stories
- Darwin’s Anachronisms: Liberalism and Conservative Temporality in The Son of the Wolf
- The People of the Abyss: Tensions and Tenements in the Capital of Poverty
- Canine Narration
- Making Sense of Jack London’s Confusion of Genres in <i>The Sea-Wolf</i>
- <i>The Iron Heel</i> and the Contemporary Bourgeois Novel
- “Mix According to Formula”: Martin Eden and the Question of Genre
- Burning Daylight
- Jack London’s Sci-Fi Finale
- The Valley of the Moon: Quest for Love, Land, and a Home
- “A Curious Sort of Book”: Jack London’s The Star Rover and the Politics of Prison Reform
- Cherry, Unfinished Business: Race, Class, and the American Empire
- Sex and Science in Jack London’s America
- From Atavistic Gutter-Wolves to Anglo-Saxon Wolf: Evolution and Technology in Jack London’s Urban Industrial Modernity
- A Bestiary from the Age of Jack London
- “The Ragged Edge of Nonentity”: Jack London and the Transformation of the Tramp, 1878–1907
- Jack London and Physical Culture
- The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories
- “See Things in New Ways”: Jack London, Socialism, and the Conversionary Model of Politics
- Jack London, Suffering, and the Ideal of Masculine Toughness
- Women’s Rights, Women’s Lives
- Blurred Lines: The Illustration of Jack London
- Index
