ABSTRACT
The October 1901 edition of The Southern Workman extols Paul Laurence Dunbar's creative talents in his fourth novel, The Sport of the Gods. The novel's exposure of an urban landscape has been treated as the thematic foundation for many theoretical readings of Dunbar's narrative. Attachment theory conceptualizes the proclivity humans have to create deep-rooted affectional bonds with others. Early attachment theorists valued the breakthroughs provided by direct observation of behavior in natural settings above the analysis of internalized psychic struggles that played out among the id, ego, and superego. African Americans commenced their habitation in North America after experiencing what attachment theorists consider the most traumatic event in a person's life: loss. Paternalism was often invoked during the antebellum period as a way to justify ownership of human property, and after the Civil War "as an attitude of condescension".
