Perhaps the most pressing matters to which students of the rather large body of so-called “race literature” produced during and immediately after the Civil War and Reconstruction must attend are simple questions of periodization and genre. In works ranging from Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) to Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and from Thomas Dixon's The Leopard's Spots (1902) to Sutton Griggs's The Hindered Hand (1905), one is confronted with what seems at times a shockingly discordant cacophony of form, theme, content, and style. “Old-fashioned” sentimental and gothic modes sit uncomfortably with modernist preoccupations with science and technology. The romance attempts valiantly, if quixotically, to regain ground long since lost to realism. And American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appear strangely preoccupied with race and racialism in a manner that many may find to be juvenile, if not downright embarrassing.

Indeed, the period, if one might call it that, seems so very unsettled as to make many otherwise rather generous scholars and critics throw up their hands in frustration. One may assume, with several notable exceptions, that the awkwardly named “postbellum race novel” is so very “undercooked” that we need pay little attention to it and then only as part of our ever so dull antiquarian duties.