The Epilogue, like the Prologue, expanded the scope of this study's main focus to demonstrate the work of dialogical relationships in the process of constructing literary history with the tropes of gender and sexuality. What emerges as the most relevant dynamic in the history of African American literature in the Jim Crow era is the double bind of the anxiety of influence and the anxiety of authorship, both resolved through different masculinity politics, which either challenge the father figures or celebrate male filial relationships. Whereas their need to resolve the anxiety of influence varies, none of the authors discussed here is free from the anxiety of authorship, and all pay tribute to a chosen – black or white – male predecessor. Interestingly, it is not the choice of the particular forefather that is significant but the way he is represented, which is most aptly illustrated by the disparate reincarnations of Frederick Douglass, ranging from Washington's self-sacrificing gentleman to Thurman's muscular pugilist. African-American attempts to assert male authorship are also complexly entangled in hegemonic ideologies of American masculinity and the social constructs directly connected with them, such as race, class, and sexuality. Washington's writing evades conflict, images of black aggression, the lynch logic, and the anxiety of influence, and it appropriates Victorian ideologies of respectable manliness, the Genteel Patriarch, and the white man's burden, positioning them in the domestic and rural contexts. In this way he avoids the anxieties that drench Du Bois's appropriation of the emergent ideology of modern masculinity for the elite of the talented tenth, which is located in the urban and public realms. Locke, similar to Du Bois, constructs a black group identity based on producerist masculinity in the urban context, yet because he consistently erases women from his narratives of black identity, he circumvents the lynch logic as well as the anxiety over the purity of black womanhood haunting Du Bois. Locke's writings resolve the anxiety of authorship by celebrating different black male writers positioned within a network of multiple textual influences. The anxiety of male authorship also dominates the writings of Thurman, who openly celebrates textual influences on his fiction to resolve it.