Imperative Duty

Howells, William Dean; Petrie, Paul R. (EDT)

ISBN 10: 1551119145 / ISBN 13: 9781551119144

Verlag: Broadview Press, 2010

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 9007883-n

Inhaltsangabe:

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor:

Paul R. Petrie is Professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University.

Bibliografische Details

Titel: Imperative Duty
Verlag: Broadview Press
Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
Einband: Softcover
Zustand: New