Birth of a Business Novel: The Call of the Wild and Its Time

초록

This paper focuses on the external (circumstantial) evidences that indicate that Jack London’s The Call of the Wild became popular to the contemporary readers partly because it addresses readers’ experience at the turn of the twentieth century, and suggests that it may be read as an organizational (or business) novel. First it presents the main current of the era in which the novel was created. At the turn of the twentieth century, American society saw the rapid growth of business organizations—particularly, large ones—and accordingly the formation of managerial class which became a major part of the middle-class. Such change was prevalent throughout the United States, and almost all Americans felt the change, and many of them were in such organizations. This experience might have led them to sense the similarity of the novel with their everyday life in organization environments, which can be an explanation of the novel’s great popularity after its publication. This paper also presents that Jack London, though never an organizational man himself, understood and the true Zeitgeist of his era and embodied it in his novel, particularly in a state that he was free from the financial burden that almost always strained him throughout his life. It briefly compares the novel with the other dog stories of London, which are all devoid of the organizational elements. It concludes with a suggestion of revision of the definition of “businessman” and “business literature.”

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