Reimagining the Republic

Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée

Sandra M. Gustafson, Robert Levine (Herausgeber)

Buch | Softcover

336 Seiten

2022
Fordham University Press (Verlag)
978-1-5315-0137-2 (ISBN)

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Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgée’s literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgée was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career.

This collection changes the way that we view Tourgée by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée reveals a new Tourgée for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.

Sandra M. Gustafson (Edited By) Sandra M. Gustafson is Professor of English and Concurrent Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a faculty affiliate of Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights and a Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She is the author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic and Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America and editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A. Robert Levine (Edited By) Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His recent books are The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson; Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies; and The Lives of Frederick Douglas. Levine is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and the editor and co- editor of a number of volumes.

Foreword

Carolyn L. Karcher | xi

Introduction: Literary Tourgée

Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine | 1

Part I: Race

1 Gothic Reconstruction: Hawthorne’s House in Tourgée’s Toinette and A Royal Gentleman

Robert S. Levine | 19

2 Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand and the Limits of White Radicalism

John Ernest | 32

3 “Queer Synecdoche”: Tourgée’s Bricks without Straw and Black Kinship

Nancy Bentley | 44

4 Reparations and Passing in Tourgée’s Pactolus Prime

DeLisa D. Hawkes | 57

5 The True Friendship of Charles W. Chesnutt and Albion W. Tourgée

Tess Chakkalakal | 70

6 “Their Position Must Be Mined”: Tourgée in Charles Chesnutt’s

Career-Long Engagement with White Readers

Jennifer Rae Greeson | 84

Part II: Citizenship

7 Reimagining the Republic: Tourgée on Citizenship

Sandra M. Gustafson | 97

8 Tourgée, Democracy, Romance, and the Art of Fiction

Kenneth W. Warren | 110

9 Exodian Allegories of Incomplete Emancipation in Bricks without Straw

Christine Holbo | 124

10 The Business of Marriage, Pluralized: Mormonism and Money in Button’s Inn

Molly Ball | 138

11 Tourgée’s New Realism: Disciplinary Reparation and the Quest for Racial Justice

Almas Khan | 151

12 With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys: Tourgée’s Legal Romance

Brook Thomas | 165

Part III: Nation

13 “I Don’t Care a Rag for the Union as It Was”: Amputation, the Past,

and the Work of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Bricks without Straw

Sarah E. Chinn | 181

14 Tracking Redress in the West: The Railroad in Tourgée’s Figs

and Thistles and Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don

Annemarie Mott Ewing | 194

15 The Literary Lost Cause of Albion Tourgée: The Project of Our Continent

Mary B. Hale | 207

16 Tourgée on the Dangers of Reconciliation: Revenge in the Reconstruction-Era Novels

Gregory Laski | 223

17 Thomas Dixon, Albion Tourgée, and the False Balance of the Civil War

Alex Zweber Leslie | 236

Afterword

Mark Elliott | 251

Albion W. Tourgée: A Chronology | 259

Acknowledgments | 263

Selected Bibliography | 265

List of Contributors | 269

Index | 273

Erscheinungsdatum	14.11.2022
Reihe/Serie	Reconstructing America
Co-Autor	Molly Ball, Nancy Bentley, Tess Chakkalakal
Zusatzinfo	6 b/w illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Essays / Feuilleton
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
ISBN-10	1-5315-0137-0 / 1531501370
ISBN-13	978-1-5315-0137-2 / 9781531501372
Zustand	Neuware