Abstract
This essay argues that despite its conspicuously melodramatic and propagandistic approach, Walter Francis White's representation of Southern racism in The Fire in the Flint draws also upon more nuanced, highly innovative technicality through the integration of Victorian emotionality, regionalist and protest realism, naturalistic determinism, and modernist emphasis on inner, psychological realities. In particular, White deploys nineteenth-century abolitionist literature's Victorian modes of affective discourse to develop the white audience's knowledge of and empathy for black people's suffering-a process further enhanced by modernist stream-of-consciousness narration which challenges the audience to feel vicariously from blacks' perspective. Such an innovatively strategic coordination of literary styles places White's novel in a unique position among early-twentieth-century African American works, where experimental narration often operates in tandem with the failure of Victorian values in the society-whether black, white, or American-they explore.