Jack London’s “many-noted call”: The Call of the Wild ’s Modernist Dislocations

Abstract: In this paper, I read The Call of the Wild (1903) within the twin contexts of what I call “long Modernism”—a strand of American literature stretching from around 1850 until the 1950s, and a more narrowly defined era of “classic” Modernism in English in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I argue that London’s text manifests many of the features generally identified with Modernism—including alienation from self and society, rupture (of text, place, and self), dislocation and displacement, and Primitivism—and that the extent of London’s formal experimentation has not previously been recognized by critics too eager to label London a Naturalist or similar.