Abstract The animal novels of Jack London have appealed to millions of people all around the world since published. And critics also analyzed them with different theories or principles, such as “Survival of the Fittest”, philosophical theories, ecocriticism and so on. With the arising and the development of postcolonialism since 1970s, more and more critics begin to pay attention to this way of criticizing. This thesis is intended to explore animal novels of Jack London from the perspective of postcolonialism. Orientalism is revealed in this paper through analyzing the binary opposition of the West versus the Non-west and the male versus the female. This paper also studies the confirmation of identity as the West of Jack London, which is realized through his creating, watching and manipulating the Non-west and the female as the “Other”.61416

Key words: Jack London; postcolonialism; Orientalism; the “Other”

摘要杰克·伦敦的动物小说自发表以来便广受世界读者的欢迎，批评家也从进化论、意识形态理论、生态主义、等各种角度对其文本进行了评论。随着20世纪70年代以来后殖民主义理论的兴起与发展，批评界对后殖民主义文化理论的关注日盛。本文拟将从后殖民主义角度解读杰克·伦敦的动物小说。本文将从西方与非西方的对立以及男性与女性的对立来揭示杰克·伦敦在文学文本掩盖下的东方主义立场，并通过他对非西方、女性这两种“他者”的创造、凝视、和操纵，探究其作为主体对身份认同的构建。

毕业论文关键词：杰克·伦敦；后殖民主义；东方主义；他者

 Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 1

3. Introduction of Postcolonialism 3

4. Orientalism in Jack London’s Novels 5

4.1 The White Man and the Indian 5

4.2 The Dominator and the Dominated 8

5. Antithesis of “Self” and the “Other” in Jack London’s Novels 11

5.1 Female Figures in Jack London’s Novels 11

5.2 “Self” and the “Other” 12

6. Conclusion 14

Works Cited 15 

1. Introduction 

Jack London (1876-1916), coming from the bottom of the society, grew up in the slum area of Oakland. Born in a family that has neither fixed occupation nor fixed residence, he lived a tough life in his teens. To support the family, he had to drop out of school, but he didn’t stop learning. He kept reading, and years later, he went to the University of California for further study. 

As a prolific writer, Jack London, in his forty years’ life, wrote more than fifty books on a wide range of topics, covering 19 novels, 152 short stories, 3 scripts and extensive reportages, informal essays, political papers and so on. Jack London enjoys a national reputation for his short stories about the cruel and vigorous 1ife of Yukon, published in many magazines and then in a book, The Son of the Wolf (1900); His works often criticize social abuses and advocate the belief of Karl Marx, such as his early book, The People of the Abyss (1903), describing London’s slum situation veritably. Martin Eden (1909) and John Barleycorn(1913) are two of Jack London’s famous semi-autobiographical works.

Jack London is well-known in the literary world both home and abroad and he was called “the father of American proletarian literature” by the famous American novelist Irving Stone. He is often paralleled with Walt Whitman and Mark Twain and is regarded to exert considerable influence on the later writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Robert Ruark.