Chapter 5 interrogates the multiple meanings of dismembered hands in the 1880s as the changes made by Reconstruction were steadily clawed back. Given the centrality and materiality of touch, the representation of hands is not only verbal but also visual – the author interrogates how hands are not just imagined in text but also imaged in drawings and cartoons. At the core of the chapter are some of the drawings Thomas Nast made about the politics around Reconstruction. Then the chapter moves from images of interacting hands to actual shaking hands during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought together veterans of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in 1888. The chapter ends with A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. Hazard is especially interesting because of a secondary character, Berthold Landau, a German 1848-er who lost his hand in the Civil War. Overlaid by a North-South romance, Hazard’s ambivalence toward Landau and Howells’s decision to kill him off are another sign of the abandonment of white commitment to Black freedom.

The genteel tradition, inspired by British essayists, thrived in the United States in the early twentieth century up until the 1930s. George Santayana coined the term in 1911 to describe a group of New England intellectuals who, through their essays, acted as cultural gatekeepers, defining the standards of moral behavior and the rules of good literature. This chapter traces a genealogy between European genteel essayists and their American counterparts, focusing particularly authors such as Charles S. Brooks, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Louise Imogen Guiney, Gail Hamilton, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, Agnes Repplier, George William Curtis, Donald Grant Mitchell, and Charles Dudley Warner. Much of the genteel essayists’ privileged Anglo, upper-middle-class, Christian values and sought to defend "high culture" against its perceived enemies: industrialism, immigration, capitalism, and class polarization. The chapter closes with a presentation of Black genteel essayistic writing and reflects on how the genteel tradition should be understood today, as a more critical eye is turned toward writers of the past whose ideals do not align with contemporary social and political sensibilities.

Literature does not reflect history: it creates possible worlds. The literature of Reconstruction participated in national debates by imagining competing fictional worlds that could have emerged from controversial policies to reconcile former enemies while promoting rights for newly emancipated freedmen. Recent scholarship defines Reconstruction spatially as encompassing the nation, not just the south, and temporally as lasting from the middle of the Civil War to the advent of legalized segregation and disfranchisement in the early twentieth century. This chapter compares works structured by four emerging plots: stories about the Union as it was, romances between northerners and southerners, racial passing, and inheritance. These plots are not mutually exclusive. For instance, romances often have consequences for inheritance. Nonetheless, debates over what sort of nation should emerge from the blood of civil war come alive by comparing how these plots were fashioned in competing ways.

Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century epitomized the social transformation happening throughout the United States at the time: an industrial revolution; transformation of technology, architecture, and infrastructure; population growth fueled by immigration; and the rise of organized labor and the growth of socialism and anarchism. Novelists writing about Chicago responded to these changes. Breaking with the “genteel tradition” that persisted in William Dean Howells’s “teacup realism” and Henry James’s aestheticism, Chicago realists represented the city with fierce irony, bleak plotlines, and frank language. Realists such as Henry Blake Fuller employed a wealth of metonymy that would better represent the new social conditions; realists such as Frank Norris employed a coarse style and melodramatic subject-matter that rejected the refinement of East Coast fiction. However, although Chicago novelists hinted at the violence in the heart of the bourgeoisie as well as the poor, their realism remained genteel in its focus on a middle-class, male individual and its reluctance to narrate the social upheavals of immigration, organized labor, and political radicalism.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

Mark Twain was a central figure in the prevailing literary movements of the second half of the nineteenth century: realism and naturalism. His friend William Dean Howells was the leading proponent of realism in American literature, and in Mark Twain he early saw a writer who would join him in his efforts to move literature beyond romanticism. Howells, Twain, and Henry James were the three most prominent figures, but other writers were also important. Although Twain did not write literary criticism that outlined his philosophy of realism, his practice was important in establishing realism as the prevailing literary movement of the time.