The Dialectic of the Familiar and the Unfamiliar: `The Jungle' in Early Slum Travel Writing

Abstract

This paper examines the widely used two-way metaphor of the `jungle' in its back-and-forth movement between imperial travel writing of the late Victorian period and early urban sociology and social reform. The analysis has two aspects: first, technologies of knowledge production such as mapping are shown to provide a common epistemological base for imperial and urban knowledges, secondly, the imagery of `the jungle' is analysed. It is shown that the images produced in the writings of explorers such as Henry Stanley relied at least to some extent on analogies to everyday problems of urban poverty and overcrowding, as well as, more implicitly, on European masculine sexual fears about reproduction, growth and decay. This particular image of `the African jungle' was then re-imported into the discourse of urban social poverty and vice, most memorably in the Salvation Army's In Darkest England and the Way Out. The process analysed in this paper is not a unique discursive dynamic, it is argued, but is rather an instance of a common manoeuvre of cultural hegemony that can be called `the dialectic of the familiar and the unfamiliar'.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.