1. Identifying whether a text is more properly literature or propaganda is, of course, extremely difficult: definitions of literary propaganda or propagandistic literature tend to fall in the category of, “I know it when I see it.” For more on the difficulty of distinguishing literature from propaganda, seeA.P. Foulkes,Literature and Propaganda.
2. Ahmad gestures toward this tension between realism and romance in American literary history when she turns her attention to Pauline E. Hopkins'sContending Forces, writing,“A decade before Du Bois's first foray into full-length fiction, Pauline E. Hopkins used the novel form to react against the limitations of realism”(782). And while Ahmad's analysis takes the connection between Du Bois and Hopkins in a different direction, this comparison is one that could potentially speak to Du Bois's engagement with the American traditions of realism and romance. This should be read against Nancy Glazener's argument that “ Hopkins's preface toContending Forces(1900), which repeatedly calls her novel a ‘romance’ in spite of her use of the realist formulation that it is a ’simple, homely tale, unassumingly told,’ might be another index of the ways in which realism offered African American writers a form of authority, but at a cost” (28–29).
3. Howells himself provides a compelling example of the difficulties associated with African-American authors' use of realism. Despite Howells's championing of realism as a powerful and aesthetic and social form, and his praise for Charles Chesnutt's regionalist short stories, Howells reacted unfavorably to Chesnutt's realist novelThe Marrow of Tradition, calling it “bitter.”
4. "More than Romance": Genre and Geography in Dark Princess