After the Civil War, the South was divided into five military
districts occupied by Union forces. Out of these regions, a
remarkable group of writers emerged. Experiencing the long-lasting
ramifications of Reconstruction firsthand, many of these writers
sought to translate the era's promise into practice. In fiction,
newspaper journalism, and other forms of literature, authors
including George Washington Cable, Albion Tourgee, Constance
Fenimore Woolson, and Octave Thanet imagined a new South in which
freedpeople could prosper as citizens with agency. Radically
re-envisioning the role of women in the home, workforce, and
marketplace, these writers also made gender a vital concern of
their work. Still, working from the South, the authors were often
subject to the whims of a northern literary market. Their visions
of citizenship depended on their readership's deference to
conventional claims of duty, labor, reputation, and property
ownership. The circumstances surrounding the production and
circulation of their writing blunted the full impact of the
period's literary imagination and fostered a drift into the
stereotypical depictions and other strictures that marked the rise
of Jim Crow.
Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle blends literary history with archival
research to assess the significance of Reconstruction literature as
a genre. Founded on witness and dream, the pathbreaking work of its
writers made an enduring, if at times contradictory, contribution
to American literature and history.