Edgar Rice Burroughs Research Articles

Geología y ficción literaria

In this article the relations between geological sciences and literature of fiction, especially with science-fiction, are reviewed. The consolidation of geology as a scientific specialization in the first half of XIXth century attracted some writers of adventure and fantasy novels who used, among other topics, matters based on geological knowledge. Some of the most representative works in this field, published in the XIXth and XXth centuries, by authors as Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. P. Lovecraft, Vladimir Obruchev, Arthur C. Clarke, George Gaylord Simpson and Sarah Andrews, are mentioned. Their contributions are divided in sections according to the aspects involved: the hollow Earth and the exploration of its inner part; the lost worlds (superficial, subterranean and extraterrestrial), inhabited by extinct animals; the prehistoric times and its antediluvian fauna; trips to other geological epochs, above all the Mesozoic times of the great dinosaurs; volcanoes, earthquakes and other natural disasters; and mines and mineral deposits. Finally, the geology of certain literary territories and the geologist, men or women, as a main character in fiction are also taken into account.

타잔의 “하얀 피부”

Tarzan, one of the most widely known cultural icons, came into being in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes. Since then, critics have read him variously as embodying heroic imperialism, violent racism, or white exclusionism. Unlike those critics who assume that Tarzan is undoubtedly white, however, this essay claims that Tarzan’s whiteness is problematic at best. Tarzan’s identity is ambiguous from the outset. Whether Tarzan is human or animal, whether he is a hybridized product of both, is not determined until the end. From other whites’ perspective, moreover, Tarzan is also divided between a civilized man able to read and write and a primitive superman unable to communicate in human language. Such ambiguity of identity culminates in the doubts that Tarzan might be a fake white who, living among savage Africans, would betray his own race, and that he might also be an undesirable and unassimilable white in the civilized society. Ultimately, I claim, the questionable whiteness of Tarzan’s “white skin” frustrates all his sedulous attempts to be integrated into core whiteness.

TARZAN IN GUJARATI: APPROPRIATION OF THE ADVENTURE GENRE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Tarzan of the Apes (1912) by Edgar Rice Burroughs is one of the popular novels of the twentieth century. The character of Tarzan has become one of the most recognized characters in popular fiction through a series initiated by novels and its adaptation in other media. Gujarati translation of this novel is simply titled Tarzan (1990) by Ramanlal Soni, which is presented as children’s fiction. This paper aims to analyze this text from the perspective of polysystem studies. It will also attempt to understand Gujarati literature as a polysystem. Polysystem theory by Itamar Even-Zohar describes a literature as polysystem. It theorizes how literary activities can be seen in relation to each other, as in a binding network from which one particular activity from those can be understood. This theory hypothesizes relations between such activities and aims to observe them from the perspective of that network. This model of looking at particular literature is beneficial for understanding how a literature works. Gujarati literature, for example, can be understood as a ‘polysystem’. However, Gujarati literary system would be unique from other literary systems as literary activities and their inter-relations are unique themselves. Such theorization requires inclusion and exclusion of what Even-Zohar has called ‘literary activities’. Defining and recognizing such activities is one of the primary aims of this paper. This paper will also attempt to analyze the genre of adventure and its connection with children’s fiction by examining Gujarati Children’s literature and will attempt to understand its formation.

“Those damned, dirty apes”: Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy and the Evolution of the Ape-Man

Abstract Netflix’s popular science fiction series The Umbrella Academy raises new questions about how the familiar trope of the ape-man has been adapted for a contemporary audience. Tracing the figure of the ape-man through representative works of nineteenth-century science fiction—Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes—shows that the character has often been used to interrogate ideas of race, gender, and power across the Victorian age. More than just a stand-in for nineteenth-century evolutionary debates, the figure of the ape-man reflects cultural ideas about the relationship between humans and their “animal instincts,” constantly questioning what sets humans apart in the hierarchy of animals.

Literature Counts: The Feelings of Overwhelmed

Literature Counts: The Feelings of <i>Overwhelmed</i>

Reese , Kevin Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions (review)

REVIEWS 557 Reese, Kevin. Celestial Hellscapes: Cosmology as the Key to the Strugatskiis’ Science Fictions. The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2019. xxiv + 253 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Appendix. Index. $109.00. Cosmology is not a conventional route into Russian literary scholarship. But, as Kevin Reese’s important new monograph argues, any apparent conventionality in the fiction of Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii always screens, or prefigures, a startling inversion of reality. The brothers’ co-authored science fiction novels, most of which appeared between 1960 and 1990, unite popular appeal with ethical profundity. They enjoyed cult status among Soviet readers; they are still widely appreciated today. Andrei Tarkovskii adapted scripts by the Strugatskiis for Stalker (1979) and The Sacrifice (1986); other Russian auteur directors, including Aleksandr Sokurov and Aleksei German Sr, also based major films on the brothers’ novels. Yvonne Howells, author of the only previously published English-language monograph on the Strugatskiis (Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, New York, 1994), showed that these stories’ complex ethical systems and mythical subtexts resonate with Jewish, Christian and Gnostic beliefs. She located Arkadii and Boris Strugatskii within the same tradition of writer-philosophers as Andrei Belyi, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov. To this list of cultural luminaries in dialogue with the Strugatskiis, Reese adds Pushkin: Celestial Hellscapes opens with an epigraph cited from the latter, as does each of its eleven sections. Pushkin, Reese tells us, determines ‘the cosmology of Russian literature’, and therefore ‘[t]o ignore Pushkin in this context would be akin to writing a history of astronomy without Galileo’ (p. xvi). While almost all the Strugatskiis’ major fictions appear at least briefly, Celestial Hellscapes is primarily concerned with seven of the brothers’ most significant novels. Taken in chronological order of composition, each book is discussed in terms of its genesis, political context, the peculiarities of its narrative universe (or cosmology), and their scientific underpinnings. Reese is well-versed in the Strugatskiis’ literary inspirations (from Heinlein and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Kruchenykh, Maiakovskii and Aksenov); he confidently explains abstruse astrophysical references (even providing occasional diagrams). A highlight is the appendix re-interpreting the final pages of Grad obrechennyi (The Doomed City, written in 1974). The novel’s hero, Andrei, appears to be safely home, observing the star Vega from the window of his Leningrad apartment. By performing an astronomical reading of the passage, Reese proves that Vega would have been invisible to any observer at that time and latitude. Therefore, for readers with the astronomical nous to notice the discrepancy, the Strugatskiis imply that the novel’s apparently happy ending SEER, 99, 3, JULY 2021 558 is an illusion: Andrei cannot be in terrestrial Leningrad and is therefore still stranded in some infernal simulacrum of Earth. Similarly, Reese’s unpacking of the technical term ‘radiant’ in Piknik na obochine (Roadside Picnic, 1972) helps to illuminate the symbolism of that novel’s mysterious Zone, strewn with alien artefacts. His familiarity with physics, mathematics, science fiction and history of science allows Reese to unlock the Strugatskiis’ extensive extra-literary coding, although their literary subtexts remain essential. He reads Vtoroe nashestvie marsian (The Second Martian Invasion, 1967) in light of its obvious precursor text, H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), and Piknik na obochine as a counterpart of Pushkin’s Mednyi vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman, 1833), since the protagonists of both works defy indifferent, incalculably superior powers. Chapter four, dramatically titled ‘Poincaré’s Starless Hell’, exemplifies Reese’s interdisciplinary approach. Henri Poincaré speculated in 1905 about humanity’s likely spiritual impoverishment without our view of the stars; in Obitaemyi ostrov (The Inhabited Island, 1969), the Strugatskiis realized this cosmological scenario in the planet Saraksh, with its opaque atmosphere. The inhabitants of Saraksh believe they live on the inner surface of a hollow globe; their conservatism and isolationism is an obvious allegory for Brezhnev’s Russia. Unsurprisingly, Obitaemyi ostrov was heavily censored. Yet the novel’s protagonist, interstellar explorer Maksim Kammerer, is a Soviet Socialist Realist hero par excellence. As Reese suggests, the Strugatskiis did write Socialist Realism: only, on the analogy of Saraksh’s cosmologically deluded denizens, they turned the standard...

Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Bibliography

Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Bibliography

Babylon under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth. Andrew Scheil. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp xvi+343.

<i>Babylon under Western Eyes: A Study of Allusion and Myth</i>. Andrew Scheil. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. Pp xvi+343.

Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur: Mythology and Geology of the Underworld

As a youngster, science fiction and fantasy books describing “lost” civilizations inside the Earth fascinated me. Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan at the Earth's Core were both in my youthful library. Little did I know, when reading those books decades ago, that I would find my way back into the interior of the Earth via a fascinating book by a Dutch geologist, Salomon Kroonenberg, which examines the geography and geology of the Earth's interior via the literary device of comparing actual surface and subsurface features to mythological descriptions of layers of Hell associated with Dante's Inferno. In Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur, Kroonenberg progresses from the Earth's surface towards the Earth's core layer by interior layer, examining how Earth's interior, and openings into it, have come to be understood by Earth scientists, but also how it has been described in myth, art, and religion in Western, Muslim, ancient Egyptian, and other cultures. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

“This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice Burroughs’sTarzanSeries

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 50, Issue 1 p. 147-162 Article “This Savage World Was an Open Book”: Genre and Landscape in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan Series Conor Reid, Conor ReidSearch for more papers by this author Conor Reid, Conor ReidSearch for more papers by this author First published: 15 February 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/jpcu.12507Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume50, Issue1February 2017Pages 147-162 RelatedInformation

Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn

Reviewed by: Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction by Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn Amanda M. Greenwell (bio) Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn. Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction. Cambridge UP, 2016. In Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, Michael Levy and Farah Mendlesohn trace the development of fantasy literature for children from its roots in sixteenth-century fable and folklore to its manifestations in the present day teen market. Wide-ranging in its text selection as well as its critical approaches, the book is the first to put the study of children's literature and the study of the fantastic in extended dialogue. In doing so, Levy and Mendlesohn have created a foundational text for the intersection of these fields. The scope of this undertaking is impressive: the authors focus on literature written in English, primarily from Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, and they include well-known as well as lesser known writers. Their critical frameworks—aside from extant scholarship on children's and fantasy literature—include historical, literary, and national contexts, material print culture, and changing conceptions of childhood and audience. Far from competing, these frameworks inform each other and bring into relief the complex interplay of forces that have shaped the production of children's fantasy literature, especially in the West. For instance, chapter 3, "The American Search for an American Childhood," reads to the rise of fantasy in the United States against the backdrop of early American distrust of the fantastic, the influence of folk and tall tales, the significance of Hans Christian Andersen, the role of public libraries, the advent of The Horn Book Magazine, and the popularity of pulp fiction—this last an oft neglected context for scholarly study of children's fantasy literature, and so much appreciated here. By engaging these frames, Levy and Mendlesohn complicate more commonly understood ancestries of children's literature by placing L. Frank Baum and E. B. White, foundational figures in American children's fantasy literature lauded by librarians, next to pulp writers such as Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, whose work, though intended for adult audiences, became popular among adolescent readers (to the chagrin of many of those same contemporary librarians) and influenced writers such as Andre Norton and Ray Bradbury. They also note significant differences between British and American children's fantasy literature, especially regarding child protagonists' relationships with parents, and emphasize the impact of J. R. R. Tolkien on American readers' conception of fantasy. [End Page 404] Here, as in other chapters, the text knits writers together across time and geography to establish and disrupt legacies in the history of fantasy literature. Chapters 5–7 ("The Changing Landscape of Post-war Fantasy," "Folklore, Fantasy and Indigenous Fantasy," and "Middle Earth, Medievalism and Mythopoeic Fantasy," respectively) exhibit the enormity of this undertaking, as the first of them opens with this statement: "In the years between 1950 and 1990, the landscape of children's fantasy in the UK and the Commonwealth changed in both literal and metaphorical ways … [and was] so prolific, and so important to the development of children's fantasy, that we have chosen to split [the period] into three [chapters]" (101). The discussion within these sections ranges vastly. The authors examine how children's fantasy of this period developed tropes now used in fantasy for adults, trace the expansion of fantasy "fodder" from classical myth to archaeological and historical inspirations from many cultures, note the trend of pushing the landscape of the fantastic from the bounded to the unbounded, and argue convincingly for a movement from the child as visitor to the fantastic to the child as participator in the mythopoeic impulse. These, of course, are just several of the many strands Levy and Mendlesohn weave. The final chapters of the book demonstrate the ways that children's fantasy of the last few decades has both inherited these complex histories and forged ahead to create new ones. Drawing a contrast to mid-twentieth century rejections of "lipstick and nylons" fantasy (a nod to C. S. Lewis's treatment of Susan in the final volume of the Chronicles of Narnia), Levy and Mendlesohn provide a nuanced critique of...

Naked on the Deserts of Mars

When John Carter, hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars, arrives on the Red Planet, he finds himself and all its inhabitants naked. In this paper, I place this trope of nudity into its contemporary social and cultural context and explore the multiple arenas within which it may have operated on its contemporary readers. Much more than simple titillation, depictions of public nudity in the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western imagination resonates in a complex and tense universe where barbarity, innocence, Edenic fantasies, and the American west collided, a space in which Richard Slotkin’s “man who knows Indians” comes to the fore with adaptive advantages that enable Carter to rise to Martian leadership—but also make him ultimately unsuited for decent society back home on Earth.

Grotesquely Becoming: Tarzan’s Queer Hominization

The essay reads Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp novel Tarzan of the Apes (1912) in the context of the tendency in Western thought to understand anthropogenesis as a process of going-astray or, to use a term that gets its contemporary connotation of sexual errancy around the time of Tarzan’s publication, of queering. The essay makes its argument by providing two interrelated discursive contexts for the novel. First, it explores Burroughs’s novel as an early twentieth-century text that illustrates the vocative ethics of Western thought. This tradition finds its most authoritative articulation in the concept of “calling” (Berufung) in Martin Luther’s theology; its twentieth-century elaborators include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Jean Laplanche. To situate Tarzan of the Apes in this history, the essay analyzes a series of scenes where the novel’s protagonists are variously solicited in the process of their development. The most important of such scenes is Tarzan’s discovery of his “fascinating avocation” as he begins to read the books that, unbeknownst to him, have been left behind by his dead human parents. The essay takes the two terms—“fascination” and “avocation”—as keywords not only in Burroughs’s novel but also in the longer genealogy of thought that the text develops.

Jamie Edward Thomerson (1935–2015)

J AMIE EDWARD THOMERSON, Ichthyologist and Professor Emeritus, Department of Biological Sciences, Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville (SIU-E), passed away quietly on 4 January 2015, in Austin, Texas, after a two-year battle with prostate cancer (Fig. 1). He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Kathleen Thomerson, his sons Austin and Eric Thomerson, his daughter Rachel Miller, a son-in-law Richard Miller, and a grandson Mason Miller. Jamie, or “Jim,” was a Texan and a country boy, and he was proud of both. He was born on 7 May 1935 in Menard, a small town in the Texas Hill Country. He grew up in that part of the world, as did his father and grandfather. Jim was the only child of Eula Lee (Martin) (1902–1998) and Roy Thomerson (1898–1976). Eula was a teacher until her marriage to Roy in 1926. In 1936, shortly after Jim’s birth, they purchased a ranch, the Old Walston Place, south of Menard and operated it as a goat and cattle ranch. In his adult life, Jim often amused students and friends by recounting stories about life on the ranch. One favorite tale described how his mother would regularly take the rifle out into their woods to hunt squirrels, which she then cleaned and fried, made gravy, and served as the family dinner. As a boy, Jim was tasked by his parents to complete a variety of ranch chores, for instance, burning the thorns off cacti so that the goats could more easily feed on the plants, and using a rifle to control ground squirrels and armadillos. The family ranch was also where Jim became fascinated with the natural world. He wandered the ranch and explored nearby streams and became enchanted with the native fish faunas. Young Jim was also an avid reader and was especially enthralled by the exploits of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ characters, Tarzan, John Carter, and Carson Napier. Jim graduated fromMenard High School in 1953 and then enrolled in the University of Texas where he majored in geology, earning a B.S. in 1957. While an undergraduate, Jim met fellow Texas student Kathleen Armstrong and the two married in Austin on 1 June 1957. Kathleen is a musician, having studied in Europe with the renowned composers and organists Jean Langlais in Paris and Flor Peeters in Antwerp. She subsequently distinguished herself professionally and academically as a church and concert organist, organ instructor, book author, and composer of widely played hymns. After military service in the National Guard, Jim taught biology and chemistry classes at Electra High School in Electra, Texas, for the 1958–59 school year. He then entered the graduate program at Texas Tech University in Lubbock where he conducted research in micropaleontology (Forminifera and Ostracoda), obtaining his M.S. in Geology in 1961. Still in his mid-20s, Jim decided to shift from geology to biology and was accepted into the graduate program at Tulane University. Jim’s wife Kathleen remembers their life in New Orleans with special fondness. At Tulane, Jim researched the hybridization, geographical variation, and distribution of the topminnows Fundulus notatus and F. olivaceus under the guidance of the legendary ichthyologist Royal D. Suttkus. Contemporary Suttkus students at Tulane during Jim’s tenure included Clyde Barbour, Glenn Clemmer, Salvador Contreras Balderas, and John Ramsey. Of course, being a Suttkus student involved intensive collection trips in the southeastern United States (Fig. 2). The Tulane Fish Collection houses specimens from 31 collections made by Jim in Fig. 1. Jamie E. Thomerson, 2011. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Thomerson.

“Elastic Soil”: The Martian Odyssey of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Joe Lansdale

The Journal of American CultureVolume 38, Issue 2 p. 142-147 Interview Essay “Elastic Soil”: The Martian Odyssey of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Joe Lansdale† John Carter Tibbetts, John Carter TibbettsSearch for more papers by this author John Carter Tibbetts, John Carter TibbettsSearch for more papers by this author First published: 24 June 2015 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.12304Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume38, Issue2June 2015Pages 142-147 RelatedInformation

FIRE-AND-WATER KNAPPING: ORIGINS OF A LITHIC FOLK TALE

Anthropology is not immune to the processes of folklore, and some “old wives' tales” have surprising endurance, especially in popular culture. The belief that arrowheads were made by dripping cold water on heated stone is a good example. Searching early references shows that this story probably originated in the early years of the last century and was popularized by Edgar Rice Burroughs, but its ultimate origins are obscure. The enduring popularity of this misinformation probably results from widespread ignorance of real knapping processes, and a certain plausibility in the minds of non-knappers.

“Learning How to Be the Boy or Girl You Are”: Me Tarzan, You Jane , the Crusade to “Cure” Pre-homosexual Children, and the New Face of the Ex-Gay Movement in the United States

This essay examines Janice Barrett Graham’s Me Tarzan, You Jane (2011) as a new form of narrative for children offering a negative viewpoint about homosexuality. While young people have long been the target of anti-LGBTQ efforts, Graham’s text signals the expansion of interventionist strategies even further into the realm of childhood. The confidence with which Graham’s narrative claims that behaviors predictive of homosexuality can be both easily identified and quickly eliminated re-energizes longstanding efforts by the ex-gay movement to medicalize homosexuality while they also serve to pathologize nonconformist children and unconventional childhoods. Finally, the book’s use of characters from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s problematic novel reveals how the anti-gay rhetoric is heavily imbricated with other discourses of intolerance, namely racism, Western imperialism, and xenophobia.

Degeneration, Gender, and American Identity in the Early Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs rendered a particular construction of womanhood as a remedy for national degeneration and neurasthenia. Progressive-era Americans like Burroughs wondered whether the developmental forces that shaped industrial society might also threaten the character and institutions upon which they believed American society and civilization functioned. Middle-class American observers worried that the character traits responsible for the rise of American greatness were undermined by that very success. In particular, they thought the demands of urban life resulted in neurasthenia, the loss of “nervous energy.” Burroughs employed the powerfully symbolic Pocahontas narrative to construct a vision of womanhood that offered the possibility of redeeming a degenerate and neurasthenic civilization. Burroughs’s construction of womanhood shares much with the traditional ideology of domesticity, yet at the same time challenged Progressive notions of femininity. Burroughs’s female characters are muscular and beautiful, aggressive and independent, and able to handle themselves in dangerous situations. For all of their independence, however, they ultimately perform the traditional roles of wife and mother. Burroughs women fulfill a domestic role, but their muscularity, self-assurance, and independence are seen as a panacea for the perceived problems of degeneration and neurasthenia, not as a threat to gender identity and roles. Soon after the end of the Great War, Jefferson Turck, an American naval aviator, returned home to a hero’s welcome. Accompanied by his young English bride, Lieutenant Turck had just completed a tour of duty that took him through Europe, North Africa, and eventually East Asia, returning home by way of the Pacific Ocean. Turck witnessed firsthand the physical, psychological, and moral effects of the First World War, and shortly after his return published his observations as a memoir of his exploits in the Old World and as a commentary on American characteristics and traits. In his memoir, Turck confidently wrote, I am glad it was given to me to be an instrument in the hands of Providence for the uplifting of a benighted Europe, and the amelioration of the suffering, degradation, and abysmal ignorance in which I found her. I shall not live to see the complete regeneration of the savage hordes of the Eastern Hemisphere – that is work which will require many generations, perhaps ages, so complete has been their reversion to savagery; but I know that the work has been started, and I am proud of the share in it which my generous countrymen have placed in my hand. A new epoch for Europe has been inaugurated, with enlightened China on the east and an enlightened Pan-America on the west – the two 1 Biggs: Degeneration, Gender, and American Identity in the Early Fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs

Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate (review)

Reviewed by: Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature by Michelle Ann Abate Ramona Caponegro (bio) Abate, Michelle Ann. Bloody Murder: The Homicide Tradition in Children’s Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2013. If Americans are obsessed with violence, we are also fixated on puzzling out the roots, the cultural representations, and the effects of our nation’s bloody obsession. In her most recent book, Michelle Ann Abate examines how homicide, one of the most horrific acts of violence, “has formed a beguiling subject and recurring theme in narratives popular with American youth for centuries” (10). Employing an interdisciplinary framework, Abate positions children’s books involving murders within the legal and sociocultural history [End Page 349] of the United States and within a media culture in which killings and other depictions of violence can be readily found in books, films, television shows, video games, news programs, and even “murderabilia.” Arguing that literary works for children previously have been excluded from cultural analyses of homicide in the United States, Abate aptly corrects this oversight, offering detailed readings of seven well-known stories for children and young adults in order to link the lethal violence in children’s literature to historical events and figures, as well as to different understandings and attitudes about murder. Abate observes, “Far from existing outside of or even separate from the history of homicide, popular American children’s literature is both influenced by it and exerts an influence on it” (25). Several of the featured children’s books address issues related directly to homicide and relevant investigatory policies and trial procedures. For example, Abate’s analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) relates the British antigallows movement that emerged during Lewis Carroll’s lifetime to his satirical portrayal of the two capital trials of the Mouse and the Knave of Hearts in the novel. Similarly, Abate draws connections between the conclusions of early criminal anthropologists, most notably Cesare Lombroso, and the physical descriptions that Edgar Rice Burroughs provides of murderers in Tarzan of the Apes (1914). Discussing Tarzan’s homicidal characters, Abate argues that “their similarities to the Italian researcher’s portrait of the ‘born criminal’ are too numerous to be merely coincidental” (105). Burroughs’s description of Tarzan’s “finely formed features, well-proportioned face, and good-looking appearance” (113) absolves him of being Lombroso’s “criminal type,” despite the numerous murders that he commits throughout the book. Just as Abate situates Tarzan within the developing field of criminal anthropology, she also locates Nancy Drew and her “famous hunches, her powerful sense of intuition, and her unfailingly accurate gut feelings” (120) within the arena of parapsychology, comparing Nancy and Eugenie Dennis, a real-life psychic from the 1920s and 1930s, and showing ways in which Nancy uses her psychic ability to prevent murders and to solve other crimes. Yet children’s books about homicide and attempted homicide deal not only with crimes and related legal policies and applied theories. They also reflect changing cultural beliefs about murder and evolving representations of murderers in different genres. According to Abate, S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967) preserves the legacy of the paperback pulp novels of the 1930s through the 1960s, particularly the accounts of juvenile delinquency, for an intended readership of young adults. Likewise, Abate demonstrates how Walter Dean Myers’s Monster (1999) combines the motivations and intentions of colonial-era execution sermons and more contemporary, sensationalized murder literature to introduce a sympathetic protagonist who may have been [End Page 350] involved in a horribly violent, graphically narrated murder. In her chapter on Monster, Abate reveals a changing cultural perception of murderers as individuals who are repellant rather than pitiable, whereas in her chapter on “Snow White,” the most psychoanalytic chapter of the book, she examines a longstanding need for parents to submerge their homicidal feelings for their offspring rather than expressing them openly. Finally, through a discussion of the killings of zombies in Stacey Jay’s My So-Called Death (2010), Abate speculates about the possible future of murder and the relevant social and legal ramifications if the United States indeed moves into a posthuman and perhaps “posthomicide” era. Though Abate references homicides...

Intellectual Disabilities and Dystopian Visions: Ayn Rand and Edgar Rice Burroughs

Most cultures have respect for and respond positively to individuals who make significant literary contributions to the way that people understand life and society. While the impact of literature may vary widely, those individuals deemed to have added important perspectives through their writing are often elevated to positions of high regard and influence. Thus, their work becomes important to our understanding of the human condition, including the meaning of disability.