America's Imagined Revolution - (Southern Literary Studies) by Tomos Wallbank-Hughes (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In America's Imagined Revolution, Tomos Wallbank-Hughes explores late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels about Reconstruction in the American South, identifying a subgenre of the historical novel dedicated to narrating Reconstruction as revolutionary history. Operating at the margins of political and historical fiction, the writers studied here excavate generic and temporal registers in the historical novel that enable them to imagine revolution in ways that eschew narratives of transition designed to describe the bourgeois-democratic nation-state to the exclusion of plantation societies. Despite being guided in recent years by critical paradigms focused on recovering neglected moments, spaces, and voices, literary historians have struggled to fit Reconstruction's revolutionary upheavals into their transformed narratives of the long nineteenth century. This book makes the case for the novel form as a vital source in reconstructing the historical consciousness of Reconstruction as a revolutionary experience. Arguing that the historical novel of Reconstruction gains formal coherence from the conscious attempt to theorize Reconstruction as revolution-and revolution as an anachronous experience-the book offers the first formal and historical account presenting novels about the Reconstruction period as constitutive of a coherent, if evanescent, aesthetic genre. By analyzing works by George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgâee, Frances Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, Wallbank-Hughes details how these authors experimented with narrative forms and subverted the epic conventions of the historical novel to reimagine the period's historiographical significance. By recovering a literary genre and intellectual tradition through their complex forms of time-consciousness, America's Imagined Revolution argues that these novels provide a window onto the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which the region became a terrain for interpreting that most un-American of phenomena: revolution. Taking seriously literary attempts to decipher revolutionary change amid the postbellum South's retrenched regimes of race and class oppression, therefore, enables a reexamination of Reconstruction's pull on the contemporary imagination, encouraging us to think anew about the cultural afterlives of slavery in relation to the idea of revolution"--

Book Synopsis

America's Imagined Revolution explores the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to ask narratological, historiographical, and theoretical questions about how slave emancipation has (and has not) been theorized as revolution. Reading historical fiction by authors such as George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgée, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois in dialogue with nineteenth-century historical writing--and the era's legal, political, and print culture--Tomos Wallbank-Hughes excavates an evanescent form of historicist writing sensitive to the revolutionary changes that shaped life in the emancipation-era South.

As an aesthetic form, the historical novel of Reconstruction poses questions about revolutionary experience in plantation societies, and in the process challenges critical assumptions about historical time in the nineteenth century: How do authors narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment? In what direction does history travel if it does not progress? What narratives of race, class, and region encompass both continued domination and ruptured power? By plumbing the situations that give it form, the historical novel of Reconstruction provides a window into the literary culture of the South's long nineteenth century in which, rather than a storehouse of tradition, the region became a terrain for interpreting social revolution and uncovering slavery's revolutionary afterlives.

America's Imagined Revolution offers a new interpretation of the literary and historiographical significance of the Reconstruction period and its relationship to American literary history.

Review Quotes

"This illuminating book examines one of the central paradoxes of Reconstruction, namely, how the event of emancipation, a radical historical break, can still seem like an unfinished or aborted revolution--perhaps even a mirage or 'nonevent.' America's Imagined Revolution takes up this puzzle and turns it into a lens for rethinking the very concept of revolution itself. Tomos Wallbank-Hughes's canny, penetrating analyses of historical novels about Reconstruction and its aftermath uncover new ways to understand emancipation as a complex, 'epoch-making force.' By the end, we are able to see literature anew as an exhilarating 'terrain for theorizing revolution.' A real achievement of lasting importance."--Nancy Bentley, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920

About the Author

Tomos Wallbank-Hughes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.