Late-19th-Century Literature

Literary studies have increasingly focused on works that are culturally relevant. Examining forgotten authors, neglected artifacts, and popular culture, scholars have a clear social purpose—they predominately explore race and gender, searching the past for an understanding of the present. African American writers such as Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Paul Laurence Dunbar attract more critical attention than W. D. Howells, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane; and Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902–03) and Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868–69) receive more critical notice than many works by traditionally canonical white male realists. Once dismissed as a missionary melodrama, Of One Blood has been rediscovered as a complex novel that anticipates Afrofuturism and explores relevant racial issues. And the sesquicentennial of Little Women, plus a new film adaptation, has drawn more scholarly notice to Alcott than to any other author from this period, a focus that further exemplifies academia's concern for culturally relevant literature. In "Literature as Equipment for Living," from his The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941), Kenneth Burke described this sociological approach as pragmatic because readers scour literary works that address societal problems. Since scholarship has continued to shift from art for art's sake to cultural studies and because these cultural examinations are predominately studies of race and gender, I have restructured this chapter; it begins with a section on African American literature, then moves to gender studies before examining other authors, including those who represent the traditional canon. But even these canonical authors are being reinterpreted; renowned realists, such as Howells and Crane, are being reread to shed light on present cultural concerns.

i African American Literature

Pauline Hopkins is the focus of nine studies. Brian Sweeney's "Throwing Stones Across the Potomac: The Colored American Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Cultural Politics of National Reunion" (American Periodicals 29: 135–62) shows how Hopkins's contributions to the Colored American Magazine challenged revisionist arguments about slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the narrative of national reunion promoted in the Atlantic Monthly. One of Hopkins's contributions was Of One Blood, a work of speculative fiction that is the subject of several critical studies this year. In Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Ohio State) Isiah Lavender III explores Afrofuturism as an aesthetic associated with recent films and argues that works such as Of One Blood and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) serve as a model for Afrofuturism because they employ a narrative practice that blended science and race. In "Utopia and the Gendered Past in Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self" (MOSF Journal of Science Fiction 3, i: 7–20) Jalondra A. Davis also reads the novel as speculative fiction, or what she calls "Afrotopia," because it imagines a utopian African society functioning as a "liberatory space"; Davis likewise praises Of One Blood as a precursor to Afrofuturism. Mary Grace Albanese's "Unraveling the Blood Line: Pauline Hopkins's Haitian Genealogies" (J19 7: 227–48) argues that the female characters in Of One Blood are connected to their Haitian heritage, not their African roots, so the novel invokes a "feminized Haitian history" that undercuts its masculine "back to Africa" romance—women are seen as the center of the narrative when the focus is on Haiti. Samantha Pinto's "Objects of Narrative Desire: An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality" (Journal of Narrative Technique 49: 351–81) also reads Hopkins's Of One Blood as primarily a narrative about Black women, not an expedition story, but she connects these women to their African identity. And Anna Pochmara's "'In the Tangled Lily-Bed': Rhizomatic Textuality and Rooted Cosmopolitanism in Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood," pp. 43–58 in Ewa Barbara Luczak, Anna Pochmara, and Samir Dayal, eds., New Cosmopolitanisms, Race, and Ethnicity: Cultural Perspectives (De Gruyter), describes the structure of Hopkins's Of One Blood as rhizomatic because it employs structural fragmentation and symbolic imagery that draws on African and North American lilies, particularly their creeping rootstalks that...