Reviewed by: The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White by Brook Thomas Amanda Brickell Bellows The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White. By Brook Thomas. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 378. $40.00, ISBN 978-1-4214-2132-2.) In his comprehensive new book, The Literature of Reconstruction: Not in Plain Black and White, Brook Thomas engages in literary analysis to examine [End Page 993] the racial, social, and political challenges of the Reconstruction era. He offers an expansive definition of this period, describing it as extending from approximately 1863, when the U.S. government began preparing to meet postwar challenges, to 1909, when the NAACP was founded. During this half century of significant change, authors ranging from Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris to Albion W. Tourgée and Charles Waddell Chesnutt produced novels and short stories that shaped and reflected the era's defining issues. By assessing these creative works, Thomas seeks to correct what he sees as an "imbalance" between the scant literary criticism and abundant historical analysis of what was arguably one of the nation's most transformative periods (p. 14). A Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine, Thomas participates in current literary, historiographical, and legal debates. He characterizes The Literature of Reconstruction as a protracted argument against interpretations of the Reconstruction era as a period in which race relations and solutions to complex postemancipation problems were "black and white" (p. 9). His work builds on the writings of literary scholars Paul H. Buck and Edmund Wilson and historians Nina Silber, David W. Blight, and K. Stephen Prince. Thomas's goals are manifold. He seeks to complicate "at least some historical generalizations about both the literature and the era" and to "enhance our historical understanding of Reconstruction literature" (p. 15). He also aims to expand the literary canon of Reconstruction-era writers by including new voices and neglected works by well-known authors as well as temper enthusiasm for transnational assessments of Reconstruction that overlook "the continued importance of domestic conflicts" (p. 16). The Literature of Reconstruction contains an introduction and seven chapters that Thomas organizes thematically in order to engage in intertextual analysis. In each chapter, he assesses how Reconstruction-era literature commented on topics ranging from federalism and industrialization to black masculinity and the Ku Klux Klan. This structure allows Thomas to extend his analysis of a particular author's work across different chapters, a technique that prevents him from placing "too much pressure on a work or an author to stand for each stage of the narrative" and allows him to "create an interplay between a variety of perspectives on crucial issues" (p. 31). Thomas draws from a wide range of secondary and primary sources, including novels, short stories, poetry, periodicals, correspondence, and court opinions. In doing so, he presents a robust, comprehensive literary history of the Reconstruction era that explores the relationships between numerous social, political, and legal dynamics. Chapter 1 examines contemporaneous debates about national reconciliation and reunion through the poetry of Sidney Lanier and the fiction of John William DeForest and Constance Fenimore Woolson. Chapter 2 assesses works that explore federalism by Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Dixon Jr., Albion W. Tourgée, Sutton E. Griggs, and Pauline E. Hopkins. The fiction of Dixon, Tourgée, DeForest, Harris, Page, and Chesnutt helps inform our understanding of varying portrayals of and responses to the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in chapter 3. The literature of Hopkins, DeForest, Chesnutt, Tourgée, and George Washington Cable illuminates competing depictions of African American manhood in the fourth chapter. Chapter 5 is particularly innovative in [End Page 994] its analysis of railroad construction and westward expansion as defining events of the Reconstruction era through the work of Mexican American author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. Finally, chapters 6 and 7 examine the themes of inheritance and legacy in the works of white writers including Page, Harris, Dixon, Cable, and Tourgée, and black authors Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Chesnutt, and Hopkins. The Literature of Reconstruction offers a thorough analysis of the fiction and poetry that played...