Introduction: The zenith & the nadir : the early African American novel -- The excess of mulatta melodrama. Mulatta melodrama : mixed race and the melodramatic mode in the early Black novel -- The apple falls far from the tree : matrilineal opposition in mulatta melodrama -- The fall of man : White masculinity on trial -- Black tropes of temperance. The genre mergers of the nadir : anti-drink literature, sentimentalism, and naturalism in Black temperance narratives -- Aesthetic excess, ethical discipline, and racial indeterminacy : Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Sowing and reaping -- Tropes of temperance, specters of naturalism : Amelia E. Johnson's Clarence and Corinne -- Enslavement to philanthropy, freedom from heredity : Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Uncalled -- Metropolitan possibilities and compulsions : the mulatta and the dandy in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the gods -- Conclusion: The nadir and beyond : echoes of mulatta melodrama and the Black temperance novel in the early twentieth century.
Summary:
"The Nadir and the Zenith is a study of temperance and melodramatic excess in African American fiction before the Harlem Renaissance. Anna Pochmara combines formal analysis with attention to the historical context, which, apart from US postbellum race relations, includes also white and black temperance movements and their discourses. Despite the proliferation of black literature in this period, and its popularity at the time, African American fiction between Reconstruction and World War I has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention as the Harlem Renaissance. Pochmara provocatively aims to suggest that the historical moment when black people's "status in American society" reached its lowest point-the so-called "Nadir"-coincides with the zenith of black novelistic productivity before World War II. Pochmara's examination explores authors such as Charles W. Chesnutt, Julia C. Collins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton Griggs, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Lillian B. Jones Horace, James Weldon Johnson, Amelia E. Johnson, Edward A. Johnson, J. McHenry Jones, and Katherine D. Tillman. Altogether, they published no fewer than 33 novels between 1865 and 1918, surpassing the creativity of New Negro prose writers and the number of novels they published during the 1920s"-- Provided by publisher.
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