Review of Michael Lundblad, The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Abstract

In The Birth of a Jungle, Michael Lundblad uses the imagery of animals to consider human behaviour in the post-Darwinian progressive-era U.S. in terms of contemporaneous literature and cultural events, with particular attention paid to the themes of sexuality, race and the business world. Lundblad astutely looks to turn of the century texts which both promote and disrupt what he terms “the discourse of the jungle” and uses a reading of both human and animal characters to successfully add to the debate on humanity and animality in recent works.