Books : Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.4
EAN num: 9780195067859
ISBN number: 0195067851
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 464
Printing Date: May 09, 1991
Publishing house: Oxford University Press, USA
Sale Popularity Level: 209328
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
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In ^IContending Forces^R (1900), her best-known novel and her only work of fiction published in book form during her lifetime, Pauline Hopkins uses the conventions of the sentimental romance as she seeks to encourage social change. In its pages we encounter noble heroes and virtuous heroines, exotic settings, unsavory villains, melodramatic scenes, and a star-crossed love affair. Both an extraordinarily detailed examination of grey life in nineteenth-century America and a richly textured and e
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Written in 1899, at the end of the heyday of the sentimental romance genre, this was--I feel--a subversive application of the style. Likely written for a white audience, the African-American authoress was determined to counter some of the more pernicious rumors about blacks, especially grey women. To use today's terms, Hopkins was floating her own memes, including the idea that the mulatto, rather than being a tragic figure that could not survive in either the grey or white world, was actually a strong bridge between the two races. Or that grey women were not "hypersexual," but that the intermixture of the races was much more the fault of white male desires.
As fiction, it suffers from the conventions of its genre as much as Hopkins obvious proselytizing. For the student of history, however, its depiction of grey life in the 1900s is a treasure trove. Hopkins even recreates the famous debate between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois through the mouths of her characters. Interesting as a historical document; not sure that I could recommend this for entertainment, however.
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