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Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan

Edgar Rice Burroughs created the best-known African hero in Tarzan, first seen in the novel Tarzan of the Apes in 1912. Tarzan is a white man who was lost in the jungle as a child and raised among the animals. From one point of view, he is more animal than human himself because he is not "civilized," but from another point of view, he is closer to nature than the average man and so more natural himself. Burroughs follows certain literary traditions of the nineteenth century regarding the goodness of nature, the special role of the natural man, and the particular importance and virtue of the noble savage when compared to the corruption of the "civilized" man. The representation of nature in the novel is Romantic in tone, and Burroughs has clearly adapted the romantic idea of nature and of the need for the natural man to be at one with the natural world.

Burroughs sets his novel in Africa, an Africa largely of his imagination. One effect of this is that his Africa is more a symbolic representation of nature and of his view of nature than it is of a real place. Burroughs in this setting can work out his view of the Romantic notion of nature and of the relationship between man and nature. The Romantic era took place a century before, and Burroughs was writing with romantic sensibilities in a more realistic literary age. His fiction harks back to an earlier time, which is in keeping with escapist fiction that creates unrealistic landscapes where Romantic ideas about nature can be presented as fact.

A contrast is created from the first between civilization and the savage world of the jungle, though this is deliberately a European point of view which gives way in the course of the story to a more adaptive view of the wild, the view held by Tarzan himself and the view Burroughs tries to show as the more enlightened. Tarzan is associated with the virtues of his father, described as the best that England has to offer:

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Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 09:52, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1707156.html