This book argues that sentimentalism, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary mode, is alive and well in the modern era. By examining working-class literature that adopts the rhetoric of “feeling right” in order to promote a proletarian or humanist ideology as well as neo-slave narratives that wrestle with the legacy of slavery and cultural definitions of African American families, it explores the ways contemporary authors engage with familiar sentimental clichés and ideals.

Black Resonance analyzes writings by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gayl Jones, and Nikki Giovanni that engage such iconic singers as Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Aretha Franklin. The book focuses on two generations of artists from the 1920s to the 1970s; each chapter pairs one writer with one singer to crystallize the artistic practice they share: lyricism, sincerity, understatement, haunting, and the creation of a signature voice.

When Sex Changed analyzes the ways literary texts responded to the political, economic, sexual, and social values put forward by the birth control movements of the 1910s to the 1930s in the United States and Great Britain. The book compares disparate responses to the birth control controversy, from early skepticism by mainstream feminists, to concerns about the movement’s race and class implications, to enthusiastic speculation about contraception’s political implications.

Unbecoming Americans identifies a canon of writers who, during the years after World War II, explored forms of belonging in the world outside the domain of modern citizenship. It examines works by C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, Claudia Jones, and Carlos Bulos that show how these writers employed aesthetic alternative forms to the novel, including memoir, cultural criticism, and travel narrative, to contest prevailing notions of race, nation, and citizenship.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of modern American multiculturalism by placing minorities at the center of American identity and imagining a new national narrative based on the model of an interracial nuclear family.

Abandoning the Black Hero examines the motivations that led certain African American authors in mid-twentieth century to shift from writing protest novels about racial injustice to novels focusing primarily, if not exclusively on whites, or white-life novels. These fascinating works have been understudied despite having been written by such defining figures as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Chester Himes, as well as lesser known but formerly best-selling authors Willard Motley and Frank Yerby.

In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll argues that the small town, as evoked by the image of “Main Street,” is not a relic of the past but rather a metaphorical screen upon which the nation’s “everyday” stories and subjects are projected on both a national and global level. It brings together a wide range of literary, cultural, and political texts to examine how the small town is used to imagine and reproduce the nation throughout the twentieth- and into the twenty-first century.

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, the book reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, the book reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

William Scott’s Troublemakers explores how a major change in the nature and forms of working-class power affected novels about U.S. industrial workers in the first half of the twentieth century. Analyzing portrayals of workers in such novels as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Ruth McKenney’s Industrial Valley, and Jack London’s The Iron Heel, William Scott moves beyond narrow depictions of these laborers to show their ability to resist exploitation through their direct actions—sit-down strikes, sabotage, and other spontaneous acts of rank-and-file “troublemaking” on the job—often carried out independently of union leadership.