Jungle Fever
eBook - PDF

Jungle Fever

Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives

  1. 248 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Jungle Fever

Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives

About this book

The sinister "jungle"—that ill-defined and amorphous place where civilization has no foothold and survival is always in doubt—is the terrifying setting for countless works of the imagination. Films like Apocalypse Now, television shows like Lost, and of course stories like Heart of Darkness all pursue the essential question of why the unknown world terrifies adventurer and spectator alike. In Jungle Fever, Charlotte Rogers goes deep into five books that first defined the jungle as a violent and maddening place. The reader finds urban explorers venturing into the wilderness, encountering and living among the "native" inhabitants, and eventually losing their minds.

The canonical works of authors such as Joseph Conrad, Andre Malraux, Jose Eustasio Rivera, and others present jungles and wildernesses as fundamentally corrupting and dangerous. Rogers explores how the methods these authors use to communicate the physical and psychological maladies that afflict their characters evolved symbiotically with modern medicine. While the wilderness challenges Conrad's and Malraux's European travelers to question their civility and mental stability, Latin American authors such as Alejo Carpentier deftly turn pseudoscientific theories into their greatest asset, as their characters transform madness into an essential creative spark.

Ultimately, Jungle Fever suggests that the greatest horror of the jungle is the unknown regions of the character's own mind.

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Yes, you can access Jungle Fever by Charlotte Rogers in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Literature & Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Acknowledgments
  5. A Note on Translations
  6. Introduction
  7. 1. Medical Discourse and Modernist Prose in Heart of Darkness
  8. 2. Pathological Philosophies of Decay in The Way of the Kings
  9. 3. Writing in The Vortex: Madness, Medicine, and the Lost Notebooks of Arturo Cova
  10. 4. "No era para narrado": Narrating Madness in Canaima
  11. 5. Surrealism, Science, and Sanity in The Lost Steps
  12. Conclusion
  13. Notes
  14. Bibliography
  15. Index