Dell'Amico is a doctoral candidate in English literature at Rutgers University. Her areas of specialization include Modernism, the twentieth-century novel, feminist theory, and theories of Postmodernism. In the following essay, she surveys several of the prominent critical approaches by which "The Beast in the Jungle" has been read in the past, positing that it is a story destined for continued popularity.

Both literary critics and the general reading public find Henry James's short story "The Beast in the Jungle" to be evocative and rich. It has inspired numerous critical studies, many of which respond to the story's fable-like quality. Two well-known critics, for example, have even referred to the story as a "fable." Allen Tate does so in his short, excellent commentary on the story that first appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1950 (also reprinted in Critical Studies on Henry James), and Millicent Bell does so in...