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.

This brief essay addresses this volume’s multiple audiences – including undergraduate and graduate students; instructors who want to incorporate a new unit on Reconstruction into a colonial and US literature survey course or to teach a class on the subject; and scholars of American literature who might or might not work in the second half of the nineteenth century – who would benefit from a basic map to the significant changes now in progress in Reconstruction studies and strategies for teaching them. Within the past decade in particular, renewed and transformative interest in Reconstruction has moved to the forefront of the fields of US history and nineteenth-century US literary history. While the Reconstruction period has long been a staple in the field of US history (however troubled that narrative might have been, a topic to which I will turn shortly), that has notably not been the case in the field of literary studies. As Gordon Hutner points out in his introduction to the 2018 special issue of the flagship field journal American Literary History entitled “Reenvisioning Reconstruction,” Reconstruction has been “among the subjects least touched” by scholars otherwise energetically focused on revising field assumptions and canons. Scholarship to remedy this stark neglect and debates about how to do so have recently risen to the top of the disciplinary agenda. As Hutner puts it, “A nucleus of scholars has been revisiting the period and committing a great deal of industry and intelligence toward uncovering its critical exigencies in ways that previous generations of Americanists had missed.”1

This essay examines race and late nineteenth-century regional fiction by asking how neighborliness helps arbitrate the tension between representations of membership in local communities and larger histories of national and regional racial dispossession.

New Orleans was central to the career of Lafcadio Hearn, the city where the young writer grew adept at explaining one culture to another – in this case, the downtown Creole culture of New Orleans to North American audiences – a skill that would serve him well when he moved to Japan. For Hearn, New Orleans signified the opposite of the mainstream US cultural values of materialism, commerce, progress, and efficiency – ideals he associated with the father who abandoned him. Instead, the city embodied the feminine, the exotic, the sensual, and a tropical lassitude that, for Hearn, became the opposite of modernity and in turn the essence of beauty.

Several figures led efforts by a white, Creole community in New Orleans in the late nineteenth century to preserve and perpetuate their Francophone literary traditions, particularly as they came to see its authority and significance eclipsed by the considerable fame of a writer who criticized their culture, George Washington Cable. Other factors added to these writers’ sense of increasing marginalization, including the fading of the French language from the workaday realities of ordinary life in the city, and the closing of French publishing companies as well. The efforts to rally against this marginalization led to public tension with Cable, which in turn launched the career of Grace King.