Mary Hale, Newberry Library

Battle Lines Redrawn: Old Dominions After Populism
The year 1896 brought both a landmark Supreme Court decision and a turning-point presidential election that realigned party coalitions and ushered in a new political period, commonly known as the Progressive Era. This paper examines the ways in which Southern political fiction registers these shifts and anticipates new dynamics and challenges for the political battles of the new century. In particular, this paper asks how Ellen Glasgow's Voice of the People offers a critique of both the dominant plantation tradition and Gilded Age politics by retelling the story of the Reconstruction in a way that accounts for the significance but also the collapse of the recent Populist insurgency.