The United States has seldom known a period of greater social and cultural volatility, especially in terms of race relations, than the years from the end of Reconstruction to the First World War. In this highly original study, Susan Gillman explores the rise during this period of a remarkable genre the race melodrama and the way in which it converged with literary trends, popular history, fringe movements, and mainstream interest in supernatural phenomena.
"Blood Talk" shows how race melodrama emerged from abolitionist works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and surprisingly manifested itself in...

This collection seeks to place "Pudd nhead Wilson" a neglected, textually fragmented work of Mark Twain s in the context of contemporary critical approaches to literary studies. The editors introduction argues the virtues of using "Pudd nhead Wilson" as a teaching text, a case study in many of the issues presently occupying literary criticism: issues of history and the uses of history, of canon formation, of textual problematics, and finally of race, class, and gender.
In a variety of ways the essays build arguments out of, not in spite of, the anomalies, inconsistencies, and dead ends in...