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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
The majority of White Fang takes place in the Yukon wilderness—referred to in the novel as the Northland—during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. After a nugget of gold was discovered in 1896 in Klondike, Yukon (a far-northern region of Canada), about 300,000 people, including a young Jack London, quit their jobs and made the journey north in hopes of striking it rich. The 21-year-old London, by that time already an aspiring writer with a taste for adventure, had been studying at UC Berkeley for one year when he decided to drop out of school and seek his fortune in the Klondike. Although he didn’t strike it rich as he’d hoped and was eventually forced to return home after contracting scurvy, London would later recall his years spent in the harsh, arctic majesty of the Yukon wilderness as the most formative of his life. “It was in the Klondike I found myself,” he wrote. “There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.” Indeed, his two most famous novels, White Fang and its companion novel published three years earlier, The Call of the Wild, both take place against the backdrop of the Klondike Gold Rush, demonstrating how influential this period was on him.
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