Truth Stranger Than Fiction

AUGUSTA ROHRBACH is currently on a joint appointment at the Bunting Fellowship Program and the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Harvard University after being Bunting Fellow the previous year. In addition she has received grants from the Ford Foundation, the Houghton Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and Oberlin College in support of this work. She taught at Oberlin College for four years (1995-99). She received a doctorate in American Literature from Columbia University in 1994. Her work has been published in national journals such as American Literature, Callaloo, Edith Wharton Review, International Studies in Philosophy, New England Quarterly, Print Magazine, and Prospects.

• Introduction: From Sentiment to Sentience Truth Stranger and Stronger than Fiction: Re-examining William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator Making it Real: The Impact of Slave Narratives on the Literary Marketplace The Strange Disappearance of Rose Terry Cooke and the Eclipse of American Realism William Dean Howells Without his Moustache To Be Continued: Double Identity, Multiplicity, and Antigenealogy as Narrative Strategies in Pauline Hopkins' Magazine Fiction The Manner of the Marketplace: Edith Wharton as a Race Writer Keeping it Real: James Weldon Johnson and the Literary Marketplace

Truth Stranger than Fiction is the first book to explore the direct relationship between slave narratives and realism in American fiction. It is a ground-breaking study, essential to the understanding of the history of American fictional realism, and should be read by all students and scholars of American literature. - Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University