Introduction: Race, Realism, and the Problem of Literary Classification -- The Long Hangover: Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Ghosts of Slavery -- Reimagining the Tragic Mulatta in Frances E.W. Harper's Iola Leroy -- Racial Fictions and the Cultural Work of Genre in Charles W. Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars -- The Limits of Literary Realism: Pauline Hopkins's Postracial Fantasy in Of One Blood -- Epilogue: Rethinking Blackness.
Summary:
"In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race: Rethinking Blackness in the African American Novel, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus argues that, in the years after Reconstruction, black and white writers alike adopted literary strategies that blended realism and romance to address the horrors endured by African Americans. As they forged a more objective and detached form of realist writing, authors drew from earlier literary modes-such as gothic, historical, and sentimental romances-to render the drama of racism as emotional, personal, and subjective. By doing so, black and white authors produced a distinctive style of hybrid writing, what Daniels-Rauterkus terms "Afro-realism," or black literary realism, made up of both mimetic and melodramatic conventions. Focusing on key novels by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus discusses how the narrative conventions and strategies of the romance-astonishing events, fantastic settings, a tendency toward melodrama, and gothic plotlines-punctuate and structure realist writings about race. For Daniels-Rauterkus, this practice constitutes "realism's romance of race," a modality that organizes much of the literature by or about African Americans produced during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers the means by which authors advocated on behalf of African Americans, challenged popular theories of racial identity and interracial marriage, disrupted the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widened the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race expands critical understandings of American literary realism by destabilizing the rigid binaries that often organize discussions of race, genre, and periodization. This compelling book models ways of reading hybrid genres and the racially mixed literary genealogies that come into view when race is brought to the forefront of critical analysis"-- Provided by publisher.
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