Reimagining the Republic

Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion W. Tourgée

Edited by Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert Levine

Contributor(s): Molly Ball, Nancy Bentley, Tess Chakkalakal, Sarah E. Chinn, Mark Elliott, John Ernest, Annemarie Mott Ewing, Jennifer Rae Greeson, Sandra M. Gustafson, Mary Hale, DeLisa D. Hawkes, Christine Holbo, Carolyn Karcher, Almas Khan, Gregory Laski, Alex Zweber Leslie, Robert Levine, Brook Thomas and Kenneth Warren

Reconstructing America

Published: 2022

ISBN: 9781531501372

Page Count: 336

Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations

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Price: $35.00

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Description: Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a major force for social, legal, and literary transformation in the second half of the nineteenth century. Best known for his Reconstruction novels A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), and for his key role in the civil rights case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), challenging Louisiana’s law segregating railroad cars, Tourgée published more than a dozen novels and a volume of short stories, as well as nonfiction works of history, law, and politics. This volume is the first collection focused on Tourgée’s literary work and intends to establish his reputation as one of the great writers of fiction about the Reconstruction era arguably the greatest for the wide historical and geographical sweep of his novels and his ability to work with multiple points of view. As a white novelist interested in the rights of African Americans, Tourgée was committed to developing not a single Black perspective but multiple Black perspectives, sometimes even in conflict. The challenge was to do justice to those perspectives in the larger context of the story he wanted to tell about a multiracial America. The seventeen essays in this volume are grouped around three large topics: race, citizenship, and nation. The volume also includes a Preface, Introduction, Afterword, Bibliography, and Chronology providing an overview of his career.

This collection changes the way that we view Tourgée by highlighting his contributions as a writer and editor and as a supporter of African American writers. Exploring the full spectrum of his literary works and cultural engagements, Reimagining the Republic: Race, Citizenship, and Nation in the Literary Work of Albion Tourgée reveals a new Tourgée for our moment of renewed interest in the literature and politics of Reconstruction.
Reviews: The “literary” Tourgée of this tour-de-force collection emerges kaleidoscopically, as both neglected and multi-faceted, a lifelong advocate for racial justice, historian of the afterlives of slavery, and a writer specializing in the still-unfinished history of emancipation. The 19 essays compellingly historicize Tourgée in all those spheres of influence through his hetero-generic writing career, from the 1870s through 1900. The result reveals Tourgée in little-known close interrelations with prominent Black and white writers of the time, and vice versa, opens out those literary networks to unexpected developments from a Tourgée vantage point. The unlikely result: nineteenth-century US literary history, with its ossified divides between antebellum romance and postbellum realism, even the revisionist divides between slavery and emancipation, can’t look quite the same again. A literary recovery project of canon busting and expansion at its best.---Susan Gillman, Distinguished Professor of Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz

In treating Tourgée’s novels in relation to changing social conditions, this collection shows literature and history as combined streams demonstrating the failure to improve the status of Black Americans. - Choice Reviews
Table of Contents: Foreword
Carolyn L. Karcher | xi

Introduction: Literary Tourgée
Sandra M. Gustafson and Robert S. Levine | 1

Part I: Race
1 Gothic Reconstruction: Hawthorne’s House in Tourgée’s Toinette and A Royal Gentleman
Robert S. Levine | 19
2 Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand and the Limits of White Radicalism
John Ernest | 32
3 “Queer Synecdoche”: Tourgée’s Bricks without Straw and Black Kinship
Nancy Bentley | 44
4 Reparations and Passing in Tourgée’s Pactolus Prime
DeLisa D. Hawkes | 57
5 The True Friendship of Charles W. Chesnutt and Albion W. Tourgée
Tess Chakkalakal | 70
6 “Their Position Must Be Mined”: Tourgée in Charles Chesnutt’s
Career-Long Engagement with White Readers
Jennifer Rae Greeson | 84

Part II: Citizenship
7 Reimagining the Republic: Tourgée on Citizenship
Sandra M. Gustafson | 97
8 Tourgée, Democracy, Romance, and the Art of Fiction
Kenneth W. Warren | 110
9 Exodian Allegories of Incomplete Emancipation in Bricks without Straw
Christine Holbo | 124
10 The Business of Marriage, Pluralized: Mormonism and Money in Button’s Inn
Molly Ball | 138
11 Tourgée’s New Realism: Disciplinary Reparation and the Quest for Racial Justice
Almas Khan | 151
12 With Gauge and Swallow, Attorneys: Tourgée’s Legal Romance
Brook Thomas | 165

Part III: Nation
13 “I Don’t Care a Rag for the Union as It Was”: Amputation, the Past,
and the Work of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Bricks without Straw
Sarah E. Chinn | 181
14 Tracking Redress in the West: The Railroad in Tourgée’s Figs
and Thistles and Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don
Annemarie Mott Ewing | 194
15 The Literary Lost Cause of Albion Tourgée: The Project of Our Continent
Mary B. Hale | 207
16 Tourgée on the Dangers of Reconciliation: Revenge in the Reconstruction-Era Novels
Gregory Laski | 223
17 Thomas Dixon, Albion Tourgée, and the False Balance of the Civil War
Alex Zweber Leslie | 236

Afterword
Mark Elliott | 251

Albion W. Tourgée: A Chronology | 259

Acknowledgments | 263
Selected Bibliography | 265
List of Contributors | 269
Index | 273
Details: ISBN-13 9781531501372
Published: 2022-12-20

Trim: 6.000in x 9.000in x 0.000in
Contributors: Contributions: Molly Ball
Molly Ball is a Post-Doctoral Associate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She has published on women’s slave narratives, seduction novels, and pedagogy, and her work has appeared in journals such as ESQ and Early American Literature. She is currently revising a book length project titled “Writing out of Time,” which examines how nineteenth-century populations deemed to have “no future” within the progressing nation both represent and dispute that temporal status through experiments with forward-moving narrative forms.
Contributions: Nancy Bentley
Nancy Bentley is Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her publications include The Ethnography of Manners and Frantic Panoramas: Mass Culture and American Literature, 1870–1920. She coauthored Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of American Literature (2005) and is currently writing a book entitled “New World Kinship and American Literature,” a study of the way the novel and other genres mediated the multiple forms of kinship in the Americas in the nineteenth century.
Contributions: Tess Chakkalakal
Tess Chakkalakal is Associate Professor of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She is the author of Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth- Century America. She is the coeditor of Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs and Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition. She is currently at work on a biography of Charles W. Chesnutt, a portion of which has been published in J19. She serves on the editorial team for The Complete Writings of Charles W. Chesnutt, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Contributions: Sarah E. Chinn
Sarah E. Chinn is Professor of English at Hunter College, CUNY. She is the author of three books: Technology and the Logic of American Racism: A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence (2000); Inventing Modern Adolescence: Th e Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America (2007); and Spectacular Men: Race, Gender, and Nation on the Early American Stage (2017), which won the 2017 George Freedley Prize for Outstanding Work of Theatre History; as well as a scholarly edition, Nine Plays of Early America (Early American Reprints, 2018). Her work has appeared in such journals as American Literature, Signs, GLQ, WSQ, and Nineteenth-Century Literature. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores representations of amputation during Reconstruction, especially as deployed by white antiracist radicals.
Contributions: Mark Elliott
Mark Elliott is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author of Color-Blind Justice: Albion Tourgée and the Quest for Racial Equality from the Civil War to Plessy v. Ferguson (2006). The book won the Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians. He also coedited Undaunted Radical: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Albion Tourgée (2010) with John David Smith. His current research focuses on ideas of human rights and American nationalism in the nineteenth century.
Contributions: John Ernest
John Ernest is Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware. He is the author or editor of twelve books and over forty journal articles and book chapters. His books include Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (2004); Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009); A Nation within a Nation: Organizing African American Communities before the Civil War (2011); The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014); Douglass in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates (2014); and Race in American Literature and Culture (2022). With Joycelyn K. Moody, he serves as editor of Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture, a series devoted to undervalued works by early African American writers.
Contributions: Annemarie Mott Ewing
Annemarie Mott Ewing is a PhD candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland. Her dissertation, “Citizenship and the Counterfactual Imagination: Race, Exclusion, and Redress in the Literature of the Long Reconstruction,” explores the way Reconstruction writings use the counterfactual to depict the undecided, malleable nature of citizenship.
Contributions: Jennifer Rae Greeson
Jennifer Rae Greeson is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (2010) and coeditor of Keywords for Southern Studies (2016) and of the Norton Critical Edition of Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Stories (2011).
Contributions: Sandra M. Gustafson
Sandra M. Gustafson is Professor of English and Concurrent Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, as well as a faculty affiliate of Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights and a Faculty Fellow at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. She is the author of Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic and Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America and editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. A.
Contributions: Mary Hale
Mary B. Hale is Assistant Director of Scholarly and Undergraduate Programs at the Newberry Library in Chicago. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she wrote a dissertation titled “Democratic Conventions: The Form of Politics in the Gilded Age.” She has won numerous awards, including a fellowship from the Massachusetts Historical Society to support her work on Henry Adams. Her work has appeared in journals such as American Literature and the New Americanist. Her current project is a consideration of the political fiction of Ellen Glasgow in the post-Populist South.
Contributions: DeLisa D. Hawkes
DeLisa D. Hawkes is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies specializing in African American literature and an affiliate faculty of the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is currently working on her first book project, which examines representations of Black and Indigenous relationships in African American print culture and their impact on narratives of racial identity and kinship in the United States. Her work has appeared in J19, MELUS, Langston Hughes Review, Studies in the Fantastic, North Carolina Literary Review, and 21st Century US Historical Fiction: Contemporary Responses to the Past (2020).
Contributions: Christine Holbo
Christine Holbo is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. Her work investigates the intersections of law, literature, philosophy, and politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the author of Legal Realisms: Th e American Novel under Reconstruction (Oxford, 2019), which explores the transformation of the realist novel in the age of the Fourteenth Amendment. Her publications on literary realism, poetic and novelistic modernism, and sentimental aesthetics have appeared in journals including ELH, American Literary History, American Literary Realism, and Early American Literature.
Contributions: Carolyn Karcher
Carolyn L. Karcher is Professor Emerita of English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Temple University. She is the author of A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (2016) and the editor of Tourgée’s novel Bricks without Straw. She is also the author of The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (1994) and Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (1980).
Contributions: Almas Khan
Almas Khan is Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. She is a literary and legal historian who analyzes how intellectual movements in law and literature have shaped conceptions of US citizenship since the Civil War. Khan’s work draws on her PhD in English from the University of Virginia and her JD with a concentration in constitutional history from the University of Chicago. Her current book project, “An Intellectual Reconstruction: American Legal Realism, Literary Realism, and the Formation of Citizenship,” construes legal realism (a progenitor of critical race theory) in relation to literary realism. Her work has appeared in the anthology Critical Insights: Social Justice and American Literature and Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History.
Contributions: Gregory Laski
Gregory Laski is the author of Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery (2018), which won the American Literature Association’s 2019 Pauline E. Hopkins Society Scholarship Award. Formerly a visiting faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, Laski is currently a civilian Associate Professor of English at the United States Air Force Academy. A Mellon Fellow at the Newberry Library in 2021–2022, he is at work on a new book project: an intellectual history of revenge in the long Reconstruction era. An overview of the study’s primary argument appeared in the December 2019 number of American Literature; this article was awarded the journal’s Norman Foerster Prize for best essay of the year as well as the 1921 Prize, given annually by the American Literature Society.
Contributions: Alex Zweber Leslie
Alex Zweber Leslie received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2021. His book project, “Reading Regions: American Literature and Cultural Geography, 1865–1925,” shows how extensive regional differences in circulation and reception shaped authorial production and the literary marketplace. His work has appeared in American Literary History and J19.
Contributions: Robert Levine
Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. His recent books are The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson; Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies; and The Lives of Frederick Douglas. Levine is the general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature and the editor and co- editor of a number of volumes.
Contributions: Brook Thomas
Brook Thomas is Chancellor’s Professor, Emeritus, at the University of California, Irvine. A scholar of law and literature, he has written about Tourgée for thirty years, including in Plessy v. Ferguson: A Brief History with Documents (1997); American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract (1999); Civic Myths: A Law and Literature Approach to Citizenship (2007); and, most recently, The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White (2017), which won the 2018 C. Hugh Holman Award from the Society for the Study of Southern Literature. His essay “Albion W. Tourgée on Race, Class, and Caste” is forthcoming in ELH.
Contributions: Kenneth Warren
Kenneth W. Warren is Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. He is the author of What Was African American Literature? (2010); So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (2003); and Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (1993) and coeditor of Renewing Black Intellectual History: The Material and Ideological Foundations of African American Thought (2010); Jim Crow, Literature, and the Legacy of Sutton E. Griggs (2013); and Imperium in Imperio by Sutton E. Griggs: A Critical Edition (2022).