The United States has seldom known a period of greater social and cultural volatility, especially in terms of race relations, than the years from the end of Reconstruction to the First World War. In this highly original study, Susan Gillman explores the emergence during this period of a remarkable genre, the race melodrama, and considers the way it converged with literary trends, fringe movements, and mainstream interest in supernatural phenomena. Blood Talk shows how race melodrama departed from abolitionist works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and manifested itself in a set of more aesthetically and politically varied works, such as historical romances, sentimental novels, the travel literature of Mark Twain, the regional fiction of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable, and the multiple genres of W. E. B. Du Bois. Gillman's readings of the race melodrama reveal how racial discourses in the United States have been entangled with occultist phenomena, from the rituals of the Ku Klux Klan and the concept of messianic second sight to the production of conspiracy theories and studies of dreams and trances. ---- Book has lightly foxed edges and minor damage to the front cover.