Author: Matthew WilsonPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604732481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
An examination of race and audience in an American innovator's writings
Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt
Author: Matthew WilsonPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604732481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
An examination of race and audience in an American innovator's writings
Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt
Author: Matthew WilsonPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496802004
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to deromanticizing trends in post–Civil War southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt's novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt's lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel's Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience. Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience. Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt's career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt's views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt's unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America's most significant writers on the subject.
The Marrow of Tradition
Author: Charles W. ChesnuttPublisher: Standard Ebooks
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306
Book Description
Following the events of the Wilmington Massacre of 1898 and the sensationalist news reports and novels that framed the events as a race riot incited by members of the black community, The Marrow of Tradition was written as a critical response to these harmful reports and provided a perspective that had otherwise been ignored. Developed out of the stories and accounts provided by members of the black community in Wilmington and from his own experience growing up and living in North Carolina, the novel is a probable accounting of the events leading up to and surrounding the Wilmington massacre. On a hot and sultry night, Major Carteret sits anxiously beside his wife, Olivia, as she enters early labor. After the fall of the Southern Confederacy, Major Carteret’s family, one of the oldest and proudest in the state, fell to ruin, culminating in the deaths of his father and eldest brother. Only through winning the hand of Olivia Merkell did his fortunes turn around, and he goes on to found the Morning Chronicle, which becomes an influential paper among the discontented citizens. With the rising political power of the newly enfranchised black community, Major Carteret wishes for a radical change in direction for his state. Yet with the inauspicious birth of his child, his beliefs will come to be tested. Across town, a young Dr. Miller returns to Wilmington to lead a newly established hospital on the old Poindexter estate. Seeking to fulfill the growing need for medical care in the black community of Wilmington, Dr. Miller established a hospital that further served as a school for nursing with future aspirations for it to become a medical school. While respected among his colleagues, the young generation of black community members, Dr. Miller faces the challenges of being a black doctor from an older generation, and the growing restrictions being established by Jim Crow laws across the state. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.
Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt
Author: Susan Prothro WrightPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1604734183
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 147
Book Description
Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt's deft manipulation of the "passing" theme to expand understanding of the author's fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories---including intertextual, signifying/discourse analysis, narratological, formal, psychoanalytical, new historical, reader response, and performative frameworks---to add richness to readings of Chesnutt's works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that "passing" is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt's writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded: journal entries, speeches, essays, and short and long fiction. The essays engage with each other to display the continuum in Chesnutt's thinking as he began his writing career and established his sense of social activism, as evidenced in his early journal entries. Collectively, the essays follow Chesnutt's works as he proceeded through the Jim Crow era, honing his ability to manipulate his mostly white audience through the astute, though apparently self-effacing, narrator, Uncle Julius, of his popular conjure tales. Chesnutt's ability to subvert audience expectations is equally noticeable in the subtle irony of his short stories. Several of the collection's essays address Chesnutt's novels, including Paul Marchand, F.M.C., Mandy Oxendine, The House Behind the Cedars, and Evelyn's Husband. The volume opens up new paths of inquiry into a major African American writer's oeuvre.
The Construction of Whiteness
Author: Stephen MiddletonPublisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496805569
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2017 This volume collects interdisciplinary essays that examine the crucial intersection between whiteness as a privileged racial category and the various material practices (social, cultural, political, and economic) that undergird white ideological influence in America. In truth, the need to examine whiteness as a problem has rarely been grasped outside academic circles. The ubiquity of whiteness--its pervasive quality as an ideal that is at once omnipresent and invisible--makes it the very epitome of the mainstream in America. And yet the undeniable relationship between whiteness and inequality in this country necessitates a thorough interrogation of its formation, its representation, and its reproduction. Essays here seek to do just that work. Editors and contributors interrogate whiteness as a social construct, revealing the underpinnings of narratives that foster white skin as an ideal of beauty, intelligence, and power. Contributors examine whiteness from several disciplinary perspectives, including history, communication, law, sociology, and literature. Its breadth and depth makes The Construction of Whiteness a refined introduction to the critical study of race for a new generation of scholars, undergraduates, and graduate students. Moreover, the interdisciplinary approach of the collection will appeal to scholars in African and African American studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, legal studies, and more. This collection delivers an important contribution to the field of whiteness studies in its multifaceted impact on American history and culture.
A Business Career
Author: Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617030697
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
Never before published, A Business Career is the story of Stella Merwin, a white woman entering the working-class world to discover the truth behind her upper-class father's financial failure. A "New Woman" of the 1890s, Stella joins a stenographer's office and uncovers a life-altering secret that allows her to regain her status and wealth. When Charles W. Chesnutt died in 1932, he left behind six manuscripts unpublished, A Business Career among them. Along with novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar, it is one of the first written by an African American who crosses the color line to write about the white world. It is also one of only two Chesnutt novels with a female protagonist. Rejecting the novel for publication, Houghton Mifflin editor Walter Hines Page encouraged Chesnutt to try to get the book in print. "You will doubtless be able to find a publisher, and my advice to you is decidedly to keep trying till you do find one," he wrote. Page clearly saw that in A Business Career Chesnutt had written a successful popular novel grounded in realism but one that exploits elements of romance.
Paul Marchand, F.M.C.
Author: Charles W. ChesnuttPublisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 140086495X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213
Book Description
Evoking the atmosphere of early-nineteenth-century New Orleans and the deadly aftermath of the San Domingo slave revolution, this historical novel begins as its protagonist puzzles over the seemingly prophetic dream of an aged black praline seller in the famous Place d'Armes. Paul Marchand, a free man of color living in New Orleans in the 1820s, is despised by white society for being a quadroon, yet he is a proud, wealthy, well-educated man. In this city where great wealth and great poverty exist side by side, the richest Creole in town lies dying. The family of the aged Pierre Beaurepas eagerly, indeed greedily, awaits disposition of his wealth. As the bombshell of Beaurepas's will explodes, an old woman's dream takes on new meaning, and Marchand is drawn ever more closely into contact with a violently racist family. Bringing to life the entwined racial cultures of New Orleans society, Charles Chesnutt not only writes an exciting tale of adventure and mystery but also makes a provocative comment on the nature of racial identity, self-worth, and family loyalty. Although he was the first African-American writer of fiction to gain acceptance by America's white literary establishment, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been eclipsed in popularity by other writers who later rose to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. Recently, this pathbreaking American writer has been receiving an increasing amount of attention. Two of his novels, Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (completed in 1921) and The Quarry (completed in 1928), were considered too incendiary to be published during Chesnutt's lifetime. Their publication now provides us not only the opportunity to read these two books previously missing from Chesnutt's oeuvre but also the chance to appreciate better the intellectual progress of this literary pioneer. Chesnutt was the author of many other works, including The Conjure Woman & Other Conjure Tales, The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow Tradition, and Mandy Oxendine. Princeton University Press recently published To Be an Author: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905 (edited by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III). Originally published in 1999. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Tales of Conjure and The Color Line
Author: Charles Waddell ChesnuttPublisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486114295
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 131
Book Description
Ten wonderful stories by pioneer of African-American fiction: "The Goophered Grapevine," "Po' Sandy," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "The Wife of His Youth," "Dave's Neckliss," "The Passing of Grandison," more. Witty, charming, insightful.
The Wife of His Youth
Author: Charles W. ChesnuttThe House Behind the Cedars
Author: Charles W. ChesnuttPublisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486121917
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
Book Description
Originally published in 1900, this groundbreaking novel by a distinguished African-American author recounts the drama of a brother and sister who "pass for white" during the dangerous days of Reconstruction.