American Literature in Transition, 1876–1910: Volume 4

Book excerpt: Addressing US literature from 1876 to 1910, this volume aims to account for the period's immense transformations while troubling the ideology of progress that underwrote much of its self-understanding. This volume queries the various forms and formations of post-Reconstruction American literature. It contends that the literature of this period, most often referred to as 'turn-of-the-century' might be more productively oriented by the end of Reconstruction and the haunting aftermath of its emancipatory potential than by the logic of temporal and social advance that underwrote the end of the century and the beginning of the Progressive Era. Acknowledging that nearly all US literature after 1876 might be described as post-Reconstruction, the volume invites readers to reframe this period by asking: under what terms did post-Reconstruction American literature challenge or re-consolidate the 'nation' as an affective, political, and discursive phenomenon? And what kind of alternative pasts and futures did it write into existence?