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Coda Owen, Skeete, and Hopkins countering the caricatures of literary realism my six chapters have revisited sets of ongoing rivalries between literary and graphic realists. They have postulated that such rivalries generate realism, as artists perceive how closely and appropriately their medium and competing mediums approach the “realities” that literary fiction seeks to represent. The chapters have neither resolved these rivalries nor reconciled the aims and abilities of artists. They have neither suggested that the same rivalries repeat nor that they follow the same trajectories from author to author. i have aimed instead to present six individual test cases in lieu of any overarching theory of illustration. a coda, then, can bring matters full-circle, profit from contrasting sets of images in realistic depictions, and demonstrate tensions between the relative abilities of different mediums that repeatedly characterize late nineteenth - and early twentieth-century american realism. Between the days of prose-only serials that reached readers without any visual aids and the eras in which cinematography began to adapt the written word to motion pictures, american realism often responded to graphic art’s presence, even its anticipated presence, on the illustrated page. The novelist, essayist, and editor Pauline e. Hopkins published Contending Forces in 1899, with a frontispiece that slyly revised Kemble’s frontispiece to Huckleberry Finn. she serialized Hagar’s Daughter in the Colored American Magazine in 1901–1902, with a frontispiece that revised eliza’s iconic river crossing from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. scholars have examined Hopkins’s perspectives on southern history and african american magazines, but they have barely touched upon the images the colored co-operative Publishing company commissioned for her work.1 They have yet to point out that realism’s verbal and visual artists eventually turned against realism’s own most stereotyped figures. Hopkins brings the arc of my study full-circle in suggesting that subsequent realist discourses reflected on earlier imagery from Billings Owen, skeete, and Hopkins 191 and Kemble, that Hopkins is a rough equivalent to Howells’s Basil march in having “had his way” with the illustrations of a realist periodical, and that a trend toward counter-caricature, initiated with Kemble and dunbar, continued with Hopkins’s illustrators, robert emmett Owen and J. alexander skeete, and went on to culminate with the artists of the Harlem renaissance. This brief coda shows that a minority member of a later generation of realists not only revised her predecessors’ modes of rendering realism but also colluded with graphic artists in revisiting realism’s established iconography, as they actively instituted minority counter-caricature. Owen renders a frontispiece depiction of the character Grace montfort’s rape and whipping in an early chapter of Hopkins’s Contending Forces. “There is a subtle play of colors in this black-and-white engraving,” Hanna Wallinger points out in Owen’s image. “The whiteness of the woman on the floor stands out in contrast to the dark attire of the man looking down upon her, while the white shirt and trousers of the man occupied with the whip are repeated by the white color of the whipping post and the trunks of the trees in the background ,” Wallinger writes in demonstrating that Owen’s image “offers an excellent opening for a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction” (155). an additional , fruitful point of entry is to contrast Owen’s and Kemble’s choice of frontispiece (compare figures 1.2 and c.1). a caucasian man stands in foreground of each image, wearing almost the same, countrified hat with the same sun-protecting brim. His left arm, akimbo in both illustrations, extends his elbow toward the right edge of each frontispiece. His left hand holds approximately the same grip at similar places near the man’s waist, where his pants, riding up, lower his perceived level of sophistication for viewers. His weapon, Huck Finn’s rifle and Hank davis’s whip, assume the same diagonal slant, from upper left to lower right. His shadow spreads, in the black-white color scheme Wallinger details, to mix with Kemble’s horizontal log and with Owen’s horizontal woman. The log and the woman sweep from lower left to upper right, from nearer in the foreground to farther away in the background, from a position parallel to the man’s stance to a place behind and beneath him. lines that had been horizontal when the tree had still stood, now appear vertical on the felled tree; lines that had marked horizontal gashes on the woman...

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