Abandoning the Black Hero: Sympathy and Privacy in the Postwar African American White-Life Novel

Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 “I’m Regarded Fatally as a Negro Writer”: Mid-Twentieth-Century Racial Discourse and the Rise of the White-Life Novel 22 2 The Home and the Street: Ann Petry’s “Rage for Privacy” 55 3 White Masks and Queer Prisons 86 4 Sympathy for the Master: Reforming Southern White Manhood in Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow 130 5 Talk about the South: Unspeakable Things Unspoken in Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee 158 6 The Unfinished Project of Western Modernity: Savage Holiday, Moral Slaves, and the Problem of Freedom in Cold War America 182 Conclusion 202 Notes 211 Works Cited 241 Index 257 ...