Tag: William Dean Howells

  • Hairy Paws and Bald Heads: Anxiety and Authority in W. D. Howells’ An Imperative Duty American Literary Realism Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2016 pages 95-111 James Weaver, Assistant Professor of English Denison University, Granville, Ohio Intensely concerned with the cultural and personal implications of miscegenation and its resultant social upheaval, W. D. Howells’ An…

  • “An Imperative Duty” tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother.

  • Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper American Literature Volume 75, Number 4, December 2003 pages 813-841 Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland Conceived in slavery, gestated in racialist science, and bred in Jim Crow segregation, the U.S. race system calcified into a…

  • Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction University of Minnesota Press July 2012 336 pages 9 b&w photos 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-7099-4 cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-7098-7 Diana Rebekkah Paulin, Associate Professor of English and American Studies Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut Imperfect Unions examines the vital role that nineteenth- and twentieth-century…

  • Crossing the Color Line: Narratives of Passing in American Literature St. Mary’s College of Maryland English 400.01 Fall 2008 Christine Wooley, Assistant Professor of English       This course will consider representations of passing (and thus also miscegenation) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. While passing has often been depicted-and dismissed-as an act of racial betrayal,…

  • “Entirely Black Verse from Him Would Succeed”: Minstrel Realism and William Dean Howells Nineteenth-Century Literature Volume 59, Number 4 (March 2005) pages 494-525 DOI: 10.1525/ncl.2005.59.4.494 Gene Jarrett, Associate Professor of English Boston University In the early months of 1896, James A. Herne returned to his hotel in Toledo, Ohio, the city where he was directing…

  • Race Passing and American Individualism University of Massachusetts Press February 2003 176 pages Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand) Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for…

  • The White Blackbird: Miscegenation, Genre, and the Tragic Mulatta in Howells, Harper, and the “Babes of Romance” Nineteenth-Century Literature Volume 56, Number 4 (March 2002) Pages 495–517 DOI 10.1525/ncl.2002.56.4.495 Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English John Carroll University In this essay I construct a literary genealogy that situates William Dean Howells in the middle…

  • Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial…