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Three Theses on Reconstruction

If we have learned anything from the recent waves of Americanist scholarship, it is that the borders that long organized literary-historical inquiry are far more unsettled than anyone knew. Although this revisionist scholarship has examined cultural processes large and small and texts that range from the highly canonical to the utterly noncanonical, so far it has had relatively little to say about one of the starkest borders in US literary history: Reconstruction. Always the most paradoxical of eras, Reconstruction demarcates the Civil War yet frequently gets swallowed up by the broader postbellum epoch that it purportedly inaugurates. Despite its status as one of the most significant and distinct eras in US political history, it has typically been omitted from or deemphasized within the narratives of nineteenth-century literary history. It is rarely a breaking point for survey courses, and there is a relative dearth of critical terms distinguishing its texts. There is no Reconstruction equivalent of the “modernist poem” or “antebellum novel”—no “Reconstruction lyric” or “Reconstruction romance” (not least because its legibility as a historical period has often been tethered to the emergence of realism). Nor has Reconstruction readily lent itself to teaching, whether due to the unusual length of its novels or its relative resistance to New Critical pedagogy. So what happens when we foreground Reconstruction, not by recentering it within literary history but by viewing it as an unsettled cultural formation? Scholars are currently answering that question. In spite of the era’s longstanding neglect in US literary studies, Reconstruction is now undergoing a kind of revival. Critics are reconsidering when Reconstruction began, when it ended, and what anchored its cultural forms and expressions. Sharon D. KennedyNolle has recast Reconstruction as an elongated era lasting from about 1865 to 1890 and revolving around the federal military’s