America's imagined revolution : the Historical Novel of Reconstruction / Tomos Wallbank-Hughes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wallbank-Hughes, Tomos, author.

Series:

Southern literary studies.

Southern Literary Studies

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reconstruction (U.S. history, 1865-1877) in literature.

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Literature and society--Southern States--History--19th century.

Literature and society.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Literature and society--Southern States--History--20th century.

Historical fiction, American--History and criticism.

Historical fiction, American.

Genre:

Literary criticism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (244 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Baton Rouge, Louisiana : Louisiana State University Press, [2024]

Summary:

"In America's Imagined Revolution, Tomos Wallbank-Hughes explores late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels about Reconstruction in the American South, identifying a subgenre of the historical novel dedicated to narrating Reconstruction as revolutionary history. Operating at the margins of political and historical fiction, the writers studied here excavate generic and temporal registers in the historical novel that enable them to imagine revolution in ways that eschew narratives of transition designed to describe the bourgeois-democratic nation-state to the exclusion of plantation societies. Despite being guided in recent years by critical paradigms focused on recovering neglected moments, spaces, and voices, literary historians have struggled to fit Reconstruction's revolutionary upheavals into their transformed narratives of the long nineteenth century. This book makes the case for the novel form as a vital source in reconstructing the historical consciousness of Reconstruction as a revolutionary experience. Arguing that the historical novel of Reconstruction gains formal coherence from the conscious attempt to theorize Reconstruction as revolution-and revolution as an anachronous experience-the book offers the first formal and historical account presenting novels about the Reconstruction period as constitutive of a coherent, if evanescent, aesthetic genre. By analyzing works by George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Frances Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, Wallbank-Hughes details how these authors experimented with narrative forms and subverted the epic conventions of the historical novel to reimagine the period's historiographical significance. By recovering a literary genre and intellectual tradition through their complex forms of time-consciousness, America's Imagined Revolution argues that these novels provide a window onto the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which the region became a terrain for interpreting that most un-American of phenomena: revolution. Taking seriously literary attempts to decipher revolutionary change amid the postbellum South's retrenched regimes of race and class oppression, therefore, enables a reexamination of Reconstruction's pull on the contemporary imagination, encouraging us to think anew about the cultural afterlives of slavery in relation to the idea of revolution"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

COVER

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Introduction: Revolution and the Historical Novel of Reconstruction

1. Liberalism and George Washington Cable's Impossible Allegories

2. Albion Tourgée and the Ironies of the Reconstruction State

3. Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and Passing's Revolutionary Event

4. W. E. B. Du Bois's Counterfactual Peasantry

Conclusion: Narrative, Revolution, (Dis)Appearance

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Description based on print version record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780807182345

0807182346

9780807182352

0807182354

OCLC:

1427662777