African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Volume 5, 1865–1880
Black Reconstructions

This book provides the richest study available of African American literature during the years immediately following the Civil War.

Eric Gardner (Edited by)

9781108427470, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 13 May 2021

330 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

Black Reconstructions: Introduction Eric Gardner
Part I. Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities: 1. Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the 15th Amendment Derrick R. Spires
2. Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry During Reconstruction Stephanie Farrar
3. National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History Rynetta Davis
4. Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry Eric Gardner
Part II. Persons and Bodies: 5. Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance: Textual Politics in the Post-War Era Kathy L. Glass
6. Post-Civil War Black Childhoods Nazera Sadiq Wright
7. Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives Keith Michael Green
8. Radical Respectability and African American Women's Reconstruction Fiction Brigitte Fielder
Part III. Memories, Materialities, and Locations: 9. The Civil War in African American Memory Cody Marrs
10. African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity Janet Neary
11. Reconstructions of the South in African American Literature Sherita L. Johnson
12. 'This Is Especially Our Crop': Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton Katherine Adams.

Subject Areas: American Civil War [HBWJ], Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]