Contents -- Introduction: A Highway through the Wilderness of Post-Reconstruction -- 1. Maternal Discourses as Antebellum Social Protest -- The Kitchen Politics of Abolitionism -- Politicizing the Black Mother's Voice -- 2. Legacies of Intersecting Cultural Conventions -- Antebellum Gender Constructions of the Black Female -- Gentility, Color, and Social Mobility -- The Pedagogy of Sentimental Literature -- Male and Female Generic Narratives of Racial Protest -- 3. To Vote and to Marry: Locating a Gendered and Historicized Model of Interpretation -- A Modern Paradigm: Antagonistic Discourses of Marriage and Freedom -- Twentieth-Century Critical Imperatives -- The Aesthetic of Race Literature -- Interpretative Model: Domestic Desire as Political Discourse -- 4. Allegories of Gender and Class as Discourses of Political Desire -- The Intended Readers of Black Women's Post-Reconstruction Domestic Novels -- The Politics of Desire -- Domestic Narrative as Racial Discourse -- The Heroine as Agent of Racial Desire -- 5. Sexual Discourses of Political Reform of the Post-Reconstruction Era -- (Black) Manhood and Womanhood as Racial and Political Signifiers of Citizenship -- Literary Interventionism -- The Domestic Heroine and Black Bourgeois Individuation -- Centering the Heroine's Virtue -- 6. Revising the Patriarchal Texts of Husband and Wife in Real and Fictive Worlds -- Gender Rites and the Higher Education of Black Women -- Gender Rites and Fictive Texts -- Love as a Strategy for Revising Spousal Roles -- 7. From Domestic Happiness to Racial Despair -- The Heroine's Work -- Black Heroines, the Racial Discourse, Formula Novels, and the Test of True Love -- 8. Domestic Tragedy as Racial Protest -- Notes -- Selected Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Y.