African American Novels and the New Slavery in the New South

The essay offers a new literary critical approach to early twentieth-century American novels that challenged the prevailing myth of the “New South” by exposing its analogies with slavery. It focuses on two complex and experimental novels published in 1905: Sutton E. Griggs’s The Hindered Hand and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream. The essay examines their oft-underestimated impact on contemporaneous best-selling novelists like Thomas Dixon, Jr. and also foregrounds how the silencing pressures of the prevailing culture of Jim Crow affected the publication history of coeval works by Mark Twain and Upton Sincair.