North to the West
Jack London and the Literature of U.S. Expansion in Canada
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8894850 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susan Kollin (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1996 |
| Volume | 26 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 63-82 |
| Publication date | 1996-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-026-02-03 |
| OpenAlex | W2016719240 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 9 |
Adventure is the energizing myth of empire . . . the American adventure stories represent. . . the policies and compromises, the punishments and rewards, and the stresses and problems involved in advancing a frontier at the expense of native populations and against natural obstacles. To read the adventures was to prepare oneself to go west and take part in the national work. (Green 1984, 4) The specifically American construction of the modern wilderness idea . . . serves increasingly to justify what are effectively imperialist inter- ventions anywhere across the globe. (Cosgrove 1995, 39) In 1902, the frontier chronicler Frank Norris wrote that having gone as far west as possible, "suddenly we have found that there is no longer any Frontier." According to him, U.S. nation-builders "went at the wilderness as only the Anglo-Saxon can" until they found they had arrived at the shores of the Pacific. The frontier reopened, he argued, when a "gun was fired in the Bay of Manila, still further Westward" (1902, 1728-29). Facing a national landscape that seemed devoid of opportunities for adventure, many U.S. writers followed this expansionist move and sought new terrain in which to play out their western dramas of expansion and conquest. While some turn-of-the-century writers reconstructed American frontiers overseas, still others, such as Jack London, relocated their western settings in the Far North.1 At a time when environmental awareness was gaining popularity in the United States, these writers often discovered it was not enough to merely restage their narratives in a new setting; thus, many of them struggled to preserve frontier experiences by framing their expansionist adventures in a conservationist rhetoric. The nostalgic yearning in these narratives for an untrammeled land, an Other to the settled spaces of the western United States, reconstructed heroic acts as the struggle to save the environment; as a result, in many of these texts wilderness advocacy emerged as a form of imperial adventure in its own right.2
Adventure · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · Colonialism · Empire · Expansionism · Frontier · Globe · Manifest destiny · Mythology · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Wilderness · American and British Literature Analysis · American Literature and Culture · Classics · History · Law · Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |