Critical Perspectives in The Call of the Wild: A Systematic Literature Review
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71222/v3jdd346Keywords:
american literature, systematic review, naturalism, eco-criticism, literary criticismAbstract
Studying English literature can be inherently challenging, especially when canonical texts involve complex thematic structures, multifaceted character developments, and profound symbolic meanings. Jack London's The Call of the Wild stands as a representative literary work that intricately explores the tenets of naturalism, the primal drive for survival, and the enduring tension between modern civilisation and innate animalistic instinct. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is meticulously conducted to identify and synthesize important critical perspectives on the novel, while simultaneously uncovering existing research gaps within contemporary literary scholarship. The entire methodological process of conducting this SLR strictly adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) framework. PRISMA provides a rigorous graphical representation of the complete process involved in executing a systematic review and meta-analysis, encompassing the comprehensive search for relevant peer-reviewed articles, the systematic filtering of these publications based on stringent inclusion and exclusion criteria, and the critical assessment of their methodological quality. The synthesized results demonstrate that the existing body of research can be broadly categorised into three primary domains: naturalistic interpretations focusing on survival and environmental determinism, psychological analyses of character transformation and primal instinct, and comprehensive studies contextualizing the socio-historical background of the narrative. Ultimately, this paper reports the key gaps, methodological limitations, and theoretical oversights in current studies that focus on critical interpretations of The Call of the Wild, thereby providing a robust foundation for future academic inquiry.References
1. D. E. Pease, "Psychoanalyzing the Narrative Logics of Naturalism: The Call of the Wild," Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 14-39, 2002.
2. D. Pizer, Ed., *The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: From Howells to London*. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
3. A. M. Duckworth, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. 1979.
4. D. Pizer, *The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism: Selected Essays and Reviews*. Carbondale: SIU Press, 1993.
5. U. K. Heise, "The environmental humanities and the futures of the human," New German Critique, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 21-31, 2016.
6. C. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism?, vol. 8. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2010.
7. G. Garrard, Ecocriticism. London: Routledge, 2004.
8. D. Campbell, "American literary naturalism: Critical perspectives," Literature Compass, vol. 8, no. 8, pp. 499-513, 2011.
9. R. Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020.
10. S. Fish, "Is there a text in this class?," in Campus Wars, London: Routledge, 2021, pp. 49-56.
11. J. L. Machor, Ed., *Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response*. Baltimore: JHU Press, 1993.
12. T. J. Spiegel, S. Schüz, and D. Kaplan, "Introduction to Naturalism: Challenges and New Perspectives," Topoi, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 671-674, 2023.
13. N. McEwan, The Survival of the Novel: British Fiction in the Later Twentieth Century. Dordrecht: Springer, 1981.
14. K. Schlosser, "Nature-Society Dialectics and Class Struggle in Selected Works of Jack London," Historical Geography, vol. 43, pp. 158-174, 2015.
15. D. Phillips, "Ecocriticism, literary theory, and the truth of ecology," New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 577-602, 1999.
16. R. Gray, A History of American Literature. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2011.
17. R. A. Lively, "The American system: A review article," Business History Review, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 81-96, 1955.
