The Birth of a Jungle: Animality in Progressive-Era U.S. Literature and Culture - Hardcover

...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)

Scholars aiming to do such rethinking amid this text's complex matrix of ideas should find The Birth of a Jungle an essential resource. (Ryan Hediger, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment)

Exemplifying a new methodology identified as'animality studies' that focuses on constructions of animality at specific historical and cultural moments, without the explicit emphasis on animal advocacy that is often found in animal studies, this book explores animality at the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. At that moment, shifts in what it meant to be both 'human' and 'animal' became crucial in terms of producing new ways of thinking about a wide range of human behaviors, including homosexuality, labor exploitation, and the lynching of black men. The discourse of 'the jungle' was born at the confluence of Darwin and Freud, once human behavior could be explained, supposedly, by animal instincts that were naturally violent in the name of survival and heterosexual in the name of reproduction. Literary and cultural texts at the turn of the twentieth century produced new ways of thinking about the 'beast within' shifting away from a Protestant Christian formulation of a devilish inner beast that was sinful and violent. But the central argument here is that Darwinist-Freudian formulations of the human animal, despite reigning critical interpretations, were often contested rather than reinforced by writers such as Jack London, Henry James, Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and William James, as well as cultural events such as a circus elephant publicly electrocuted at Coney Island, an African man on display in the Monkey House of the Bronx Zoo, and the Scopes "Monkey Trial." Ultimately, this book reveals not only new ways of thinking about familiar texts, but also the significance of the question of the animal in relation to fields such as the history of sexuality, studies of literary naturalism, and critical race studies within American literary and cultural studies. The book reveals how the figure of the animal evolved in U.S. literature and culture at the turn of the century, particularly through the birth of the jungle: a discourse that continues to enable enduring justifications of homophobia, economic exploitation, and racism in the United States and beyond.