Abstract
In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair delineates the social evils in the early 20th-century America from such aspects as the evils of reification, banality and unscrupulous personality. He discloses the phenomena of reification appearing under the systematic force by highlighting the reification of political-commercial relation, capitalist-worker relation and interpersonal relation, denouncing the social trample on laborers’ basic human rights and dignity from the perspectives of political corruption, politician-businessman collusion and capital monopolization. Moreover, he explores the anti-civilization, anti-socialness and anti-ethics of banality of evils through the revelation of evil-doings of scabs, manual laborers and real estate brokers. Finally, the unscrupulous personality finding expression in jealousy, avarice and lust brings to light the pleasure-seeking evil psyche harmful to social interaction.
Highlights
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a representative writer of “Muckraking Novel” in the early 20th-century America
In the first half of the 20th century, he was well-known in American literary circles and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943
In The Jungle, Sinclair describes the evils of capital under the systematic power
Summary
Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was a representative writer of “Muckraking Novel” in the early 20th-century America. China of the early 21st century and the United States of the early 20th century are in the period of social transformation with rapid economic development, so they share many similarities in certain fields, such as food safety, moral and ethical issues and labor-capital relations Rereading this novel is helpful to deepen our apprehension of some social problems in either China or America. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) dispatched his agents to Chicago to verify the problems revealed in the novel and urged the Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and the Meat Inspection Act (1906) in the year the novel was published In this novel, Sinclair discloses political corruption, collusion between government and business, cruel exploitation of monopoly capital, miserable life of laborers, rampant counterfeit and inferior products, and criminal acts such as prostitution, gambling, fraud and alcoholism in social life. This paper intends to explore Sinclair’s description of evils in The Jungle from the perspectives of reification, banality and unscrupulous personality, so as to unveil the social crisis in the early 20th-century America
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