The flaming sword / by Thomas Dixon ; with an introduction and notes by John David Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Dixon, Thomas, Jr., 1864-1946.

Contributor:

Smith, John David, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

White supremacy movements--Fiction.

White supremacy movements.

Back to Africa movement.

Anti-communist movements.

African American criminals.

African American criminals--Fiction.

Anti-communist movements--Fiction.

Murder victims' families--Fiction.

Murder victims' families.

Back to Africa movement--Fiction.

New York (N.Y.)--Fiction.

New York (N.Y.).

National Book Committee.

South Carolina--Fiction.

South Carolina.

Lynching--Fiction.

Lynching.

Racism--Fiction.

Racism.

Genre:

Fiction.

Political fiction.

Physical Description:

xxix, 453 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, [2005]

Summary:

Thomas Dixon, perhaps most widely known for supplying the historical basis for D.W. Griffith's landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915), was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century. With the novels The Leopard's Spots (1902), The Clansman (1905), The Traitor (1907), and The Sins of the Father (1912), Dixon popularized and romanticized the history of Southern redemption and the Ku Klux Klan's rise and fall. Dixon's last novel, The Flaming Sword (1939), is a scathing response to the ideas of the great black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois and to contemporary racial and international tensions. In the novel, Dixon portrays the doom of twentieth-century America as the result of a joint conspiracy by African Americans and Communists.

The Flaming Sword is not only a diatribe against communism, but is also Dixon's clarion call for the repatriation of African Americans. The story ignites when a sexcrazed black man named Dan Hose savagely murders a white man and his infant son; he then rapes and murders the man's sister-in-law (ostensibly after having read a James Weldon Johnson poem). The novel concludes with an urban uprising and a biting caricature and denunciation of DuBois.

Dixon's novel begins in a pastoral mode but moves quickly into a fast-paced melodrama. The Flaming Sword is a dramatic and provocative fictional treatment of the politics and history of race formation-the racial fantasies of one of America's most notorious white supremacists.

Contents:

Part I The Crime 1

Part II The Search 151

Part III The Solution 311.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (page xxvii, xxix).

ISBN:

0813191297

OCLC:

57579186