Much has been written about cultural imperialism and the effects
of Britain and British culture on colonized people, but Joseph
McLaughlin suggests that the influence worked both ways. Focusing
on the relationship between the literature of British imperialism
and turn-of-the-century metropolitan culture, Writing the Urban
Jungle offers an account of the cultural confusion caused by
bringing the foreign home.
Narrative, plots, and language formerly used to describe the
colonies, McLaughlin argues, became ways of reading and writing
about life in London, "that great cesspool into which all loungers
and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained," as Arthur Conan
Doyle's Dr. Watson describes it in A Study in Scarlet (1887), the
initial Sherlock Holmes tale. Canonical and popular literature by
Doyle, Margaret Harkness, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot, and the
literature of social reform and urban ethnography by General
William Booth of the Salvation Army and Jack London all display
this inversion of colonial rhetoric. By deploying the metaphor of
"the urban jungle," these writers reconfigure the urban poor as "a
new race of city savages" and read urban culture as a "Darkest
England," an Africa-like place rife with danger and novel
possibilities.
Drawing from and extending the field of criticism pioneered by
Edward Said, Writing the Urban Jungle presents a powerful new
paradigm for reading late-Victorian, modernist, and postcolonial
literary and historical texts. It also provides a fresh tool for
urban anthropologists working in our own fin-de-siecle.
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