Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.

In 1905, at the height of both Jim Crow segregation and the Progressive era, Sutton E. Griggs and Charles W. Chesnutt published two complex and experimental novels that explored the “new slavery” that dominated in the New South. In The Hindered Hand and The Colonel’s Dream Griggs and Chesnutt, respectively, evoked literary tropes and narrative strategies connected with the representation of slavery. At the same time, through revisionary intertextuality, irony, and experimentation with the temporal construction of narrative form, they defamiliarized such tropes and strategies, in order to instantiate awareness-raising meta-narrative mechanisms that required the active critical involvement of readers in the process of interpretation, as would become characteristic of modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Griggs’s and Chesnutt’s ability to take at a deeper level the portrayal of their segregationist times influenced contemporaneous mainstream representational politics with a force that is yet to be fully estimated, as can be gauged by the defensiveness that underlies Thomas Dixon’s attempt at the appropriation and racist misreading of African American literature and culture in his own fiction.

Recovering from the Civil War and facing the closing of the Western frontier, fin de siècle American society could be characterized as postapocalyptic. Americans were beginning to grapple with a geographically united but culturally divided country. Rural versus urban divisions, color lines, class lines, and gender conflict stratified everyday life. Religion, while still important, no longer provided social coherence because of the growing diversity of faiths. Apocalyptic form offered predominantly secular ways of engaging these conflicts, dramatizing resistance to violence and dehumanization while revealing the racist and classist ideologies underlying social demarcations, making it harder to ignore “how the other half lives.” Works such as Joseph Nicolar’s The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, and Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives addressed past and current cataclysms while still providing hope for a transformed future. Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague, however, critiqued the “savage” class system of fin de siècle American society, offering harsh judgement without revelation. With the United States’s entry into World War I, apocalyptic rhetoric shifted from an isolationist focus on internal divisions to an awareness of external dangers to the nation.