The Birth of a Jungle
Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture
Michael Lundblad
Reviews and Awards
"...Lundblad's The Birth of a Jungle is a remarkable achievement and an important contribution to the study of Progressive-Era literature and culture. ... By analyzing animals and environments as discursive formations that produce a range of power relations and identity formations, Lundblad's work ultimately suggests that we ought to supplement our contemporary political contestations over 'actual' animals and environments with a cultural politics that attends just as vigorously to their representations." --American Literary History Online
"The Birth of the Jungle powerfully delineates a pivotal moment in U.S. cultural history in which discursive identification with the nonhuman animal went hand in hand with violent social domination." --American Literature
"This book offers an innovative conceptualization of 'animality' as a historical and theoretical paradigm that reshapes what we thought we knew about human-animal relations in the Progressive Era. The book takes risks as it aims to make important critical interventions. ... It carves out a unique niche for itself by challenging us to consider how 'animality' pushes us past our own current conceptual critical categories for thinking about human-animal bonds." --Journal of American Studies
"Rigorously researched, adeptly argued, and accessibly written, Michael Lundblad's The Birth of a Jungle deserves to be read cover to cover. Illustrated with a plethora of exciting case studies--including the eroticism of Jack London's depiction of wolf-human contacts, the public electrocution of a circus elephant as evincing 1900s class warfare, and the import of racial lynching in the Tarzan series--this book brilliantly reveals a history of animality sutured in the figure of the 'jungle' as an organizing discourse for turn-of-twentieth century literature, law, science, economics, politics, and everyday life." --Marlon B. Ross, author of Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
"The Birth of a Jungle is an important, timely consideration of both actual flesh-and-blood animals and how humans have been understood through a discourse of animality. After reading Lundblad's book, it will be impossible not to recognize the prevalence of animality in U.S. literature of this period." --Rachel Adams, author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America
"A substantial contribution to modern American fiction studies as well as interdisciplinary animal studies. Lundblad's literary and cultural history uncovers striking alternatives to Darwin and Freud running wild in the period obsessed with identifying, interpreting, and ultimately controlling 'animal instincts.' By problematizing histories that animalize animals alongside humans, The Birth of the Jungle explains why the scholarly practice of literary animal studies can never quite be tamed by the mandates of advocacy and activism." --Susan McHugh, author of Animal Stories: Narrating across Species Lines and Dog
"Michael Lundblad's The Birth of a Jungle offers a profound and much needed intersectional analysis of animality in relation to such themes as gender and sexuality, class, race, and the natural environment. Exploring the complex and complicated discourse on 'the jungle' in turn-of-the-century U. S. literature and history, Lundblad develops a provocative and compelling account of the importance of the figure of animality in the constitution of U. S. identities. This book will no doubt become one of the founding texts for future work in animality studies and should also be an essential reference point for scholars working in American Studies." --Matthew Calarco, author of Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida
