Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain,
and William Faulkner is a strikingly original study of works by
three postbellum novelists with strong ties to the Deep South and
Mississippi Valley. In it, Barbara Ladd argues that writers like
Cable, Twain, and Faulkner cannot be read exclusively within the
context of a nationalistically defined "American" literature, but
must also be understood in light of the cultural legacy that French
and Spanish colonialism bestowed on the Deep South and the
Mississippi River Valley, specifically with respect to the very
different ways these colonialist cultures conceptualized race,
color, and nationality.
Ladd probes the work of these writers for discontinuities, for
moments of narrative incoherence, from which she charts the
ideological winds that blew through the United States in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Cable's The
Grandissimes, written at the beginning of the Redemption era, the
discontinuities are strategic whispers to the reader about the
reality of racial division and violence that lay beneath the white
reconciliation romance. Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those
Extraordinary Twins also inscribes racial discord, although with
the added dimension of experimentation with form. And in Absalom,
Absalom and Light in August, narrative incoherence becomes central
as Faulkner explores the impact of radical racism on the ways that
whiteness was constructed in the early twentieth century. Neither
"race" nor "nation," Ladd shows, is stable in the work of these
writers, but is always contested and shifting.
Ladd's book raises provocative questions about the relationships
between race, region, and nationalism in literary study. With its
innovative approach and rich New Historicist method, it is an
important contribution to scholarship in several fields.
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