Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods: Naturalism, Protest, and Performativity
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Middle Tennessee State University
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This project seeks to reclaim Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) as the first foray of an African American author into protest fiction. Previously, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) had been given the honor. Better known for his poetry, Dunbar as a novelist has been critically neglected. Past scholarship centers on his contributions to the plantation and northern migration themes as well as his contribution to dialect poetry. However, in his brief life, he published prophetically despite the racial confines of his time, paving way for later African American novelists to contribute to the naturalist tradition of social protest. This thesis will complicate current readings of the novel by re-examining Dunbar’s version of naturalism in light of social protest fiction as well as race gender performativity.
This project seeks to reclaim Paul Laurence Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902) as the first foray of an African American author into protest fiction. Previously, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) had been given the honor. Better known for his poetry, Dunbar as a novelist has been critically neglected. Past scholarship centers on his contributions to the plantation and northern migration themes as well as his contribution to dialect poetry. However, in his brief life, he published prophetically despite the racial confines of his time, paving way for later African American novelists to contribute to the naturalist tradition of social protest. This thesis will complicate current readings of the novel by re-examining Dunbar’s version of naturalism in light of social protest fiction as well as race gender performativity.