African American Literature in Transition, 1865–1880: Volume 5, 1865–1880 Black Reconstructions African American Literature in Transition Series

This volume offers the most nuanced treatment available of Black engagement with print in the transitional years after the Civil War. It locates and studies materials that many literary historians leave out of narratives of American culture. But as important as such recovery work is, African American Literature in Transition, 1865?1880 also emphasizes innovative approaches, recognizing that such recovery inherently challenges methods dominant in American literary study. At the book's core is the recognition that many period texts - by writers from Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and William Wells Brown to Mattie Jackson and William Steward - are not only aesthetically striking but also central to understanding key socio-historical and cultural trends in the nineteenth century. Chapters by leading scholars are grouped in three sections - 'Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities', 'Persons and Bodies', and 'Memories, Materialities, and Locations' - and focus on debates over race, nation, personhood, and print that were central to Reconstruction.

Black Reconstructions: Introduction Eric Gardner; Part I. Citizenships, Textualities, and Domesticities: 1. Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the 15th Amendment Derrick R. Spires; 2. Stories of Citizenship: The Rise of Narrative Black Poetry During Reconstruction Stephanie Farrar; 3. National Housekeeping: (Re)dressing the Politics of Whiteness in Nineteenth-Century African American Literary History Rynetta Davis; 4. Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry Eric Gardner; Part II. Persons and Bodies: 5. Black Reform, Writing, and Resistance: Textual Politics in the Post-War Era Kathy L. Glass; 6. Post-Civil War Black Childhoods Nazera Sadiq Wright; 7. Disabling Freedom: Bloody Shirt Rhetoric in Postbellum Slave Narratives Keith Michael Green; 8. Radical Respectability and African American Women's Reconstruction Fiction Brigitte Fielder; Part III. Memories, Materialities, and Locations: 9. The Civil War in African American Memory Cody Marrs; 10. African American Literature of the West and the Landscape of Opportunity Janet Neary; 11. Reconstructions of the South in African American Literature Sherita L. Johnson; 12. 'This Is Especially Our Crop': Blackness, Value, and the Reconstruction of Cotton Katherine Adams.

Eric Gardner is award-winning author of Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) and Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015) and editor of rediscovered works by several nineteenth-century African American writers. He teaches at Saginaw Valley State University.