Victims and Heroes : Racial Violence in the African American Novel Book

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
1	Violence, Victims, and Heroes in the Antebellum Slave Narrative	9
	Images of Violence	9
	Victims and the Sentimental	13
	Whipping, Sentiment, Sex, and Sade-ism: Douglass's Narrative	15
	Douglass's Narrative: Autonomy and the Hero	23
2	Prototypes in the Antebellum Novel	31
	Clotel; or, The President Daughter	31
	Blake: or, The Huts of America	38
	The Garies and Their Friends	44
3	Searching for the Hero, 1865-1900: Black Warrior, Forgiving Christ	53
	The Warrior	53
	The Martyr	57
	The Mythology of White Manhood: Men and Brutes	58
	Overcoming the Brute-Inheritance	63
4	The Truth about Lynching, 1892-1922: Harper, Hopkins, Griggs, and Their Contemporaries	71
	The Historical Context	71
	The Imagery of Lynching and the Lynch Mob	75
	The Violent Hero: A Minority Report	81
	Trying for Conciliation	87
	The Nonviolent Hero	90
	It Isn't Rape: The War of the Counterstereotypes	93
	Making Their Own World	100
5	The Limits of the Hero: Chestnutt's Marrow of Tradition and Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man	105
	Chestnutt, the Victorian	105
	The Big Three: A Cross-Section of the White South	107
	Every Finer Instinct	110
	William Miller: The Tragedy of Reasonableness	112
	Lynching and the "Ex" in "Ex-Colored Man"	116
	How Can There Be a Hero in a Real World?	124
6	Art and Lynching: The Harlem Renaissance and the 1930s	127
	Jean Toomer's Cane: Beauty and the Beast	127
	The Aesthetes: Fauset, Hughes, Thurman, and Schuyler	142
	The Moralists: Du Bois, Jones, and White	150
	Folk Resignation: Lee and Turpin	155
7	After World War II: Lynching, History, and the Source of Identity	161
	The Disappearance of Traditional Lynching: A New Optimism	161
	The Past as Identity: James Baldwin	166
	Fathers and Sons: Richard Wright's Long Dream	170
	Fathers and Sons: The Redemptive Community from John O. Killens to Raymond Andrews	173
	Doubting the Father-Hero: W. E. B. Du Bois, William Mahoney, and Sarah E. Wright	187
8	Richard Wright and Bigger Thomas: Grace in Damnation	197
9	The Rebel Stirs: Temporary Insanity and Creative Riots	211
	After Bigger Thomas	211
	The development of the Northern Ghetto	214
	A New City Fiction: Striking Out Blindly	217
	The Street: The North's Lynch Mob	218
	The Primitive: The Night of the Long Knife	220
	Invisible Man: Tempering Rage with Irony	224
	Invisible Man: Irony over Violence	228
	Invisible Man: The Hero as Ironist	230
10	The Rise of the Black Revolutionary: The Making of an Image	237
	The Creation of the Black Power Movement	237
	Wish-Fulfillment Fantasies in Five Black Power Novels	246
	John A. Williams and the Realist's Dilemma	251
	Black Power and the Power of Art: Alice Walker's Meridian	257
	The Waning of Black Power's Power: Ernest J. Gaines and Joseph Nazel	262
11	The Fall of the Revolutionary: The Image Dismantled	265
	The Moral and Practical Drawbacks of Retaliatory Violence	265
	Satirizing the Violent Hero: Ishmael Reed and Others	271
	John Edgar Wideman: The Dark Side of the Black Power Hero	274
12	It Ends in Brotherhood: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon	281
	Economic and Feminist Forces behind the Dissolution of the Black Power Hero	281
	Song of Solomon	286
	Huey and Eldridge	290
	Milkam: Learning the Final Lesson	297
	Reconciliation: The Last Move	304
	Notes	311
	Index	359