English Faculty Publications
Title
Black Naturalism, White Determinism: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Naturalist Strategies
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 2012
Publication Source
Studies in American Naturalism
Abstract
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born into a country with already existing expectations regarding African Americans. While this is not a novel observation, it is intended to acknowledge the differing assumptions critics and readers, both then and now, bring to his work. As a black male author in a predominantly white literary world, Dunbar had to navigate the racial presumptions of editors and readers alike in order to succeed. To be financially successful while maintaining his political and aesthetic stance, Dunbar had to create literary strategies capable of critiquing the social, political, economic, and cultural problems facing African Americans that, at the same time, would not explicitly confront white readers’ internalized beliefs regarding blacks. As Gene Jarrett argues in Deans and Truants (2007), Dunbar’s experience with the racial realism of William Dean Howells led to Dunbar’s experimentation with literary naturalism. It is this experimentation that informs Dunbar’s naturalist depictions of white determinism. While I am broadly concerned with Dunbar’s larger naturalist strategies, my specific interest is in the naturalist strategies Dunbar employs to represent the interactions between African American and white characters, strategies intended to subvert socially sanctioned white assumptions regarding African Americans. In this sense, Dunbar’s experimentation with naturalist strategies early in his career— in the short fiction he was writing at the same time as his early novels— allows him to present white determinism as a corrective to the biological assumptions perpetuated by white literary naturalism.
ISBN/ISSN
1931-2555
Publisher
International Theodore Dreiser Society
Volume
7
Issue
1
Peer Reviewed
yes
eCommons Citation
Morgan, Thomas Lewis, "Black Naturalism, White Determinism: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Naturalist Strategies" (2012). English Faculty Publications. 24.
https://ecommons.udayton.edu/eng_fac_pub/24
Comments
Copyright (c) 2013, Studies in American Naturalism.