The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel

Author/Contributor(s):	Pochmara, Anna
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Date:	05/01/2021
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

This book presents "a study of temperance and melodramatic excess in African American fiction before the Harlem Renaissance. Anna Pochmara combines formal analysis with attention to the historical context, which, apart from US postbellum race relations, includes also white and black temperance movements and their discourses. Despite the proliferation of black literature in this period, and its popularity at the time, African American fiction between Reconstruction and World War I has not attracted nearly as much scholarly attention as the Harlem Renaissance. Pochmara provocatively aims to suggest that the historical moment when black people's 'status in American society' reached its lowest point--the so-called 'nadir'--coincides with the zenith of black novelistic productivity before World War II"--