{"id":24614,"date":"2012-08-02T02:12:50","date_gmt":"2012-08-02T02:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=24614"},"modified":"2020-03-07T01:43:11","modified_gmt":"2020-03-07T01:43:11","slug":"an-imperative-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=24614","title":{"rendered":"An Imperative Duty"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Imperative Duty<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Broadview Press<\/a>
\nMarch 2010 (Originally Published in 1891)
\n200 pages
\nISBN: 9781551119144 \/ 1551119145<\/p>\n

W. D. Howells<\/a><\/strong> (William Dean Howells) (1837-1920)<\/p>\n

Edited by:<\/p>\n

Paul R. Petrie<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of English
\nSouthern Connecticut State University<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An Imperative Duty<\/em> 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. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation<\/a>” in the post-Reconstruction<\/a> United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise<\/strong>, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.<\/p>\n

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta<\/a>” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n