Upton Sinclair's The Jungle - 9781604138870

Industrialization, immigration, corporate and government responsibility, the limits of capitalist power---Upton Sinclair's The Jungle foregrounds classic American issues and themes that are still debated today. The subject of renewed scrutiny by scholars particularly interested in the novel's ecological and environmental messages, the work's depiction of a meat-processing plant pressed the U.S. government into taking steps to regulate the industry for the benefit of workers and consumers. With an introduction by scholar Harold Bloom, this new gathering of full-length critical essays traces the legacy of a book that has come to exemplify literature in the service of social change.

Despite Sinclair's obvious interest in describing the environmental consequences of production, environmentally minded readers are likely to object even to Sinclair's central metaphor---the jungle---which often uncritically seems to reinforce an antipathy toward nature itself---Steven Rosendale

The America of The Jungle is a network of graft and corruption; for the immigrant, surviving is unlikely, prosperity next to impossible. . . . Sinclair... does not conceive the tale as an individual struggle that jurgis can win. Sinclair's point, and the driving force behind his message, is that the machine of society is too powerful for one man to stand against.---Elizabeth Kraft

Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations a series of more than 100 volumes presents the best current criticism on the most widely read and studied poems, novels and dramas of the Western world from Oedipus Rex and The Iliad to such modern and contemporary works as William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Each volume opens with an introductory essay and editor's note by Harold Bloom and includes a bibliography a chronology of the writer's life and works and notes on the contributors. Taken together, Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations provides a comprehensive critical guide to the most vital and influential works of the Western literary tradition