Off Whiteness: Place, Blood, and Tradition in Post-Reconstruction Southern Literature

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"This book examines the concept of whiteness as imagined by four Southern writers of the post-Reconstruction period: Thomas Nelson Page, Ellen Glasgow, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. Izabela Hopkins argues that the unique narrative positions of these writers, offering their perspectives from both sides of the color line, allow for an objective scrutiny of the role of place and heritage in conceptions of Southern whiteness. By examining these authors, the project presents an alternate interpretation of Southern whiteness and demonstrates that reconstructions of whiteness need not be reduced to outward manifestations of color-white or black-but rather purposefully explore the ambivalence existing in the US South of the early twentieth century"--