This chapter wrestles with the contradictory power that popular romance wields in American culture. These novels both uphold heteropatriarchal norms through their fidelity to the marriage plot, but also unsettle romance tropes as a mode of resisting pernicious stereotypes about Black love and dysfunctional families and counter ubiquitous representations of Black pain. Through a close reading of work by writers such as Sister Souljah, Terry McMillan, and Beverly Jenkins, this chapter upends the claim that Black popular romance is unimaginative and does not merit serious critical analysis as well as defies the common belief that Black popular fiction is a political wasteland. As it reimagines Black popular romance as a space of political possibility with immense cultural impact, this chapter deromanticizes the book publishing industry as a site of antiracism by uncovering the numerous hurdles that Black popular romance writers must clear before they publish novels with Black love at the center.

This chapter examines Charles Chesnutt’s teaching career in the south during Reconstruction. Chesnutt left his work as a teacher in order to pursue a career in literature, primarily of fiction. The connection between Chesnutt’s stories and his experiences as a Black teacher in the south reveals a new story about Black education crucial to understanding the history of Reconstruction.

The introduction posits a crucial hypothetical question: If the basic trajectory of the postwar literary field saw highbrow fiction become increasingly associated with progressive liberal politics, even though the simultaneous trajectory of postwar American politics saw the fall of New Deal liberalism and the rise of a historically unique form of modern conservativism, then what insights about literary taste and perceptions of aesthetic value could a book-length reconstruction of these dual literary-historiographic narratives produce? After reviewing the germane existing scholarship, this chapter explains that the aim of Postwar American Fiction and the Rise of Modern Conservatism is not just to unravel the perception that highbrow literature is a natural, virtually inexorable, ally of post-sixties progressive liberalism, but also to show how that connection is a historically contingent development shaped in part by deeper arguments within movement conservatism about the purpose and acquisition of literary cultural capital.

This chapter recovers W. E. B. Du Bois’s unpublished novel “Scorn” (1905) to argue that it announces the political and temporal posture that structures much of Du Bois’s work: apocalyptic ambivalence. Apocalyptic ambivalence registers a skeptical attitude toward history’s celebration of grand gestures and dramatic transformations and instead trains its attention on the quotidian and mundane practices that might reconstruct social arrangements and reveal an otherwise unimaginable world. In this regard, apocalyptic ambivalence is a political position and registers a temporal logic and narrative approach that Du Bois would mobilize time and time again over the course of his expansive and multimedial oeuvre. Suggesting that Du Bois often made recourse to apocalyptic tropes and rhetoric – most notably in Black Reconstruction (1935) – this chapter locates “Scorn” as a text whose formal and generic contours stage a series of thwarted and deferred apocalyptic events only to offer the fulfillment of the apocalyptic promise in the world of interracial labor and an all-black education settlement. In so doing, “Scorn” shifts the idea of apocalypse away from world-ending devastation and toward the conditions of everyday life.