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Nassim W. Balestrini and Sharon D. Raynor explore Dunbar’s war poetry in their contributions. In “National Memory and the Arts in Paul Laurence Dunbar ’s War Poetry,” Balestrini suggests that approximately twenty of Dunbar’s four hundred poems deal with the topic of war. The majority of these works, Balestrini argues, adhere to long-established poetic styles; even the poems written in dialect are presented in traditional metrical and stanzaic forms. In “‘Sing a Song Heroic’: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Mythic and Poetic Tribute to Black Soldiers,” Raynor investigates several of Dunbar’s war poems and concludes that Dunbar uses myth, memory, and folklore to both memorialize and pay tribute to the identity of black soldiers. She examines various aspects of Dunbar’s tribute poetry and concludes that Dunbar’s poetry historicizes, mythologizes, and memorializes the stories and sacrifices of black soldiers. In “Minstrelsy and the Dialect Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar,” Elston L. Carr Jr. suggests that there is little question that Dunbar’s dialect poetry can be read as a mask in motion that presents oppositional and subversive themes within the signifying system as described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and, to a lesser degree, within the blues matrix as described by Houston A. Baker. Carr proposes an additional way of reading Dunbar’s work that amplifies the motif of masking by considering the cultural context and implications of dialect writing in the late nineteenth century. Megan M. Peabody, in “Dunbar, Dialect, and Narrative Theory: Subverted Statements in Lyrics of Lowly Life,” provides insight into Dunbar’s use of a multileveled, dialect-driven narrative that proves that not all utterance can be trusted and that readers must look to the narrative gaps for answers and truths. Peabody encourages a rereading of Dunbar within this context as a means of reckoning with historical and critical marginalization and examining his importance as a purveyor of black experience . In doing justice to these dual modes, Peabody utilizes Gérard Genette’s narrative theories in a close study of selections from Lyrics of Lowly Life. Part II: Race, Rhetoric, and Social Structure The authors of the essays in this section open new avenues for reading Dunbar ’s works by bringing together several significant readings on issues ranging from his polemics from minstrel performances to his works published in popular magazines to representations of Christmas as a means of racial uplift. To begin, in “Rhetorical Accountability: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Search for ‘Representative’ Men,” Coretta M. Pittman explores Dunbar’s essay “Representative American Negroes” to discuss why character and respectability were twin components that drove the rhetorical message in Dunbar’s search for what was representative of blacks during his time. Pittman suggests that xiv Willie J. Harrell Jr. the recognition and examination of racial schism that would define America in the twentieth century is important in explaining the value of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) relative to Dunbar’s essay on representative African Americans. Mark Noonan, in “‘Jump Back, Honey, Jump Back’: Reading Dunbar in the ContextoftheCenturyMagazine,”examinestheapparentinfluenceofClarence Edmund Stedman and James Whitcomb Riley on Dunbar to show that much of what is viewed as his “natural” pastoral inclinations and inherent lyricism was in fact gleaned from his readings in a genteel publication interested in promoting “the folk” and “the ideal,” in part, as antidotes to urbanism and industrialization. Meanwhile, Matt Sandler, in “The Glamour of Paul Laurence Dunbar: Racial Uplift, Masculinity, and Bohemia in the Nadir,” seeks to map Dunbar’s work in what has been called the age of Washington and Du Bois by examining his relationship with one of the most prominent white editors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, George Horace Lorimer at the Saturday Evening Post. The possibility that Dunbar might have been a representative of a newly forming black bohemia during this time, Sandler argues, is thinkable only if we consider the existence of a fully fleshed-out community with teachings and culture to preserve, not merely based on the fact that he was an aesthete. Tracing the politics of restoring Edward Windsor Kemble’s almost forgotten illustrations to critical conversations, and of attempting to reconstruct their appearance before audiences, Adam Sonstegard’s essay, “Kemble’s Figures and Dunbar’s Folks: Picturing the Work of Graphic Illustration in Dunbar’s Short Fiction,” offers a unique examination in which he suggests that reading these tales as they were written and illustrated resurrects Dunbar’s struggle for authority...

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