An Imperative Duty (Broadview Editions) - Softcover

W.D. Howells

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551119145 ISBN 13: 9781551119144

Publisher: Broadview Press, 2010

Synopsis

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda’s heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by “miscegenation” in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells’s most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the “tragic mulatta” in literature, interracial marriage, the “science” of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells’s literary realism.

About this title

About the Author

Paul R. Petrie is Professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University.

From the Back Cover

An Imperative Duty tells the story of Rhoda Aldgate, a young woman on the verge of marriage who has been raised by her aunt to assume that she is white, but who is in fact the descendant of an African-American grandmother. The novel traces the struggles of Rhoda, her family, and her suitor to come to terms with the implications of Rhoda's heritage. Howells employs this stock situation to explore the newly urgent questions of identity, morality, and social policy raised by "miscegenation" in the post-Reconstruction United States. The novel imagines interracial marriage sympathetically at a time when racist sentiment was on the rise, and does this in one of Howells's most aesthetically economical performances in the short novel form.

Appendices to this Broadview Edition include material on the "tragic mulatta" in literature, interracial marriage, the "science" of race in the nineteenth century, and Howells's literary realism.

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1551119145
• ISBN 13: 9781551119144
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 200