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Furthermore, under the circumstances of the society of the time, The Call of the Wild is not only a story of a dog’s adventurous transformation; it is also, in deep level, a story in which a dog’s life fully reflects truth about human condition. Buck and the other dogs are offered with human characteristics owning various psychological activities in order to illustrate human nature and human society at that time. The number of dog characters in the novel almost equals the number of human characters. Each character is depicted vividly with unique temperaments and dispositions just like human beings. This allegory of man made this novel unparalleled popular and also stimulated different critics and studies of the novel to achieve a better understanding.
Literary criticism of Jack London began to proliferate since the 1970s. Robert Niemi in The Oxford Encyclopedia Of American Literature said that in the history of American literature, no writer has been as riddled with contradictions, as controversial, as prolific and popular in his time, or as fascinating as Jack London (Parini, 2011:469). Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Spencer’s social Darwinism, Nietzsche’s superman philosophy, London’s ideas and thoughts in literary composition are very rich and sophisticated from different perspectives. This is also one of the reasons why his works have been and are still been studied across the world. When his master piece, The Call of the Wild, was published, H. L. Menken wrote of London's story, "No other popular writer of his time did any better writing than you will find in Call of the Wild"(net 1).
In the study of The Call of the Wild, critics mainly analyze it from the perspectives of eco-criticism, the psychological analysis of the character Buck, the study of American proletarian literature through London’s other famous works such as The People of the Abyss and The Iron Heel, and naturalism, among which the analysis of eco-criticism in his novels are most widely achieved. However, the analysis from the perspective of naturalism is still worth of further studying.
So with the aid of qualitative methods and some reference books, this thesis aims to analyze the presentation and reflection of naturalism in The Call of the Wild, and through the analysis we can get a further study of the theme of it, which surely help us have a closer and deeper understanding of Jack London and his masterpiece, as well as a broader understanding of naturalist literature in general.
2 An Overview of American Naturalism
Since this essay mainly talks about naturalism in Jack London’s novel The Call of the Wild, it is necessary and indispensable to illustrate what is naturalism first, and the origin and development of naturalism, and the main characteristics of naturalism. So this section will focus on American naturalism, explain what naturalism is and trace back its origin and development, discuss the major characters, finally demonstrate American naturalism from all-round perspectives.
2.1 The Origin and Development of American Naturalism
Naturalism was a literature movement taking place in late 18th century and early 19th century, aiming at an even more faithful, unselective representation of reality, a reality presented without moral judgment. Inspired by adaptation of the principles and methods of natural science, especially Charles Darwinism, naturalism suggested that social conditions, heredity and environment had an inescapable force in shaping human character. Naturalism is the outgrowth but differ from realism. Naturalism believed in scientific determinism which emphasized accidental, physiological nature rather than the moral or rational equalities. The New Encyclopedia Britannica said, Individual characters were seen as helpless products of heredity and environment, motivated by strong instinctual drives from within, and harassed by social and economic pressure from without. As such, they had little responsibility for their fates, and the prognosis for their “cases” was pessimistic at the outset