糖心TV

Please join us Thursday, May 16th at 2pm CT (3pm ET, 20.00 BST) for a Facebook Live discussion and Q&A featuring Tomos Wallbank-Hughes and his new LSU Press book, "America's Imagined Revolution: The Historical Novel of Reconstruction."

RSVP to the event here:

"America鈥檚 Imagined Revolution" explores the Reconstruction period after the Civil War to ask narratological, historiographical, and theoretical questions about how slave emancipation has (and has not) been theorized as revolution. Reading historical fiction by authors such as George Washington Cable, Albion Tourg茅e, Charles Chesnutt, Frances Harper, and W. E. B. Du Bois in dialogue with nineteenth-century historical writing—and the era鈥檚 legal, political, and print culture—Tomos Wallbank-Hughes excavates an evanescent form of historicist writing sensitive to the revolutionary changes that shaped life in the emancipation-era South.

As an aesthetic form, the historical novel of Reconstruction poses questions about revolutionary experience in plantation societies, and in the process challenges critical assumptions about historical time in the nineteenth century: How do authors narrate epochal change that also feels like retrenchment? In what direction does history travel if it does not progress? What narratives of race, class, and region encompass both continued domination and ruptured power? By plumbing the situations that give it form, the historical novel of Reconstruction provides a window into the literary culture of the South鈥檚 long nineteenth century in which, rather than a storehouse of tradition, the region became a terrain for interpreting social revolution and uncovering slavery鈥檚 revolutionary afterlives.

"America鈥檚 Imagined Revolution" offers a new interpretation of the literary and historiographical significance of the Reconstruction period and its relationship to American literary history.

Order copies of "America's Imagined Revolution" here:

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Tomos Wallbank-Hughes is a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of 糖心TV.