Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers)
In Contending Forces (1900), her best-known novel and her only work of fiction published in book form during her lifetime, Pauline Hopkins uses the conventions of the sentimental romance as she seeks to encourage social change. In its pages we encounter noble heroes and virtuous heroines, exotic...
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In Contending Forces (1900), her best-known novel and her only work of fiction published in book form during her lifetime, Pauline Hopkins uses the conventions of the sentimental romance as she seeks to encourage social change. In its pages we encounter noble heroes and virtuous heroines, exotic settings, unsavory villains, melodramatic scenes, and a star-crossed love affair. Both an extraordinarily detailed examination of black life in nineteenth-century America and a richly textured and engrossing piece of fiction, Contending Forces remains one of the most important works produced by an African-American before World War I.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780195067859 (0195067851)
ASIN: 195067851
Publish date: May 9th 1991
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Pages no: 464
Edition language: English
I read this book for a lit class in college. I really liked it at the time. It has a unique style that is lyrical at times.
Written in 1899, at the end of the heyday of the sentimental romance genre, this was--I feel--a subversive application of the style. Likely written for a white audience, the African-American authoress was determined to counter some of the more pernicious rumors about blacks, especially black women. ...
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 by Pauline E. Hopkins, Richard Yarborough, now listed on BookLikes)