Download or read book Charles W Chesnutt and the Progressive Movement written by Ernestine Williams Pickens and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Passing in the Works of Charles W Chesnutt written by Susan Prothro Wright and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book To Be an Author written by Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collected in this volume are the 1889--1905 letters of one of the first African-American literary artists to cross the "color line" into the de facto segregated American publishing industry of the turn of the century. Selected for inclusion are those chronicling the rise of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), an attorney and businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, who achieved prominence as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and lecturer despite the obstacles faced by a man of color during the "Jim Crow" period. In his insightful commentaries on his own situation, Chesnutt provides as well a special perspective on life-at-large in America during the Gilded Age, the "gay `90s" (which were not so gay for African Americans), and the Progressive era. Like his black correspondents--Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, T. Thomas Fortune, and William M. Trotter--he was one of the major commentators on what was then termed the "Negro Problem." His most distinguished novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), were published by major "white" presses of the time; not only did his editors and publishers but then-preeminent black and white critics greet these literary protests against racism as proof of the intellectual and artistic excellence of which a long-oppressed people were capable when afforded equal opportunity. Since the 1960s, when the rediscovery of his genius began in earnest, Chesnutt has received even more recognition than he enjoyed by the early 1900s. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III, have surveyed every collection of Chesnutt's papers and those of his correspondents in order to reconstruct the story of his most vital years as an author. Their introduction contextualizes the letters in light of Chesnutt biography and the less-than-promising prospects faced by a would-be literary artist of his racial background. Their encyclopedic annotations explaining contemporary events to which Chesnutt responds and what was then transpiring in both black and white cultural environments illuminate not only Chesnutt's character but those of many now unfamiliar figures who also contributed to what Chesnutt termed the "cause." Provided in this first-ever edition of Chesnutt's letters is a detailed portrait of one of the pioneers in the African-American literary tradition and a panorama of American life a century ago. Originally published in 1997. 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.
Download or read book Charles W Chesnutt Essays and Speeches written by Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been considered by many the major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance. This book collects essays he wrote from 1899 through 1931, the majority of which concern white racism, and political and literary addresses he made to both white and black audiences from 1881 through 1931.
Download or read book The Journals of Charles W Chesnutt written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Born on the eve of the Civil War, Charles W. Chesnutt grew up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a county seat of four or five thousand people, a once-bustling commercial center slipping into postwar decline. Poor, black, and determined to outstrip his modest beginnings and forlorn surroundings, Chesnutt kept a detailed record of his thoughts, observations, and activities from his sixteenth through his twenty-fourth year (1874-1882). These journals, printed here for the first time, are remarkable for their intimate account of a gifted young black man's dawning sense of himself as a writer in the nineteenth century. Though he achieved literary success in his time, Chesnutt has only recently been rediscovered and his contribution to American literature given its due. The only known private diary from a nineteenth-century African American author, these pages offer a fascinating glimpse into Chesnutt's everyday experience as he struggled to win the goods of education in the world of the post-Civil War South. An extraordinary portrait of the self-made man beset by the urgencies and difficulties of self-improvement in a racially discriminatory society, Chesnutt's journals unfold a richly detailed local history of postwar North Carolina. They also show with great force how the world of the postwar South obstructed--and, unexpectedly, assisted--a black man of driving intellectual ambitions.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W Chesnutt written by Susanna Ashton and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2017-12-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d'état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt's works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt's works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.
Download or read book An Exemplary Citizen Letters of Charles W Chesnutt 1906 1932 written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book collects the letters written between 1906 and 1932 by the African-American novelist and civil rights activist Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). His correspondents included prominent members of the Harlem Renaissance as well as major American political figures Chesnutt sought to influence on behalf of his fellow African Americans.
Download or read book Charles W Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race written by Dean McWilliams and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first African American writer of fiction to win the attention and approval of America's literary establishment. Looking anew at Chesnutt's public and private writings, his fiction and nonfiction, and his well-known and recently rediscovered works, Dean McWilliams explores Chesnutt's distinctive contribution to American culture: how his stories and novels challenge our dominant cultural narratives--particularly their underlying assumptions about race. The published canon of Chesnutt's work has doubled in the last decade: three novels completed but unpublished in Chesnutt's life have appeared, as have scholarly editions of Chesnutt's journals, his letters, and his essays. This book is the first to offer chapter-length analyses of each of Chesnutt's six novels. It also devotes three chapters to his short fiction. Previous critics have read Chesnutt's nonfiction as biographical background for his fiction. McWilliams is the first to analyze these nonfiction texts as complex verbal artifacts embodying many of the same tensions and ambiguities found in Chesnutt's stories and novels. The book includes separate chapters on Chesnutt's journal and on his important essay "The Future American." Moreover, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race approaches Chesnutt's writings from the perspective of recent literary theory. To a greater extent than any previous study of Chesnutt, it explores the way his texts interrogate and deconstruct the language and the intellectual constructs we use to organize reality. The full effect of this new study is to show us how much more of a twentieth-century writer Chesnutt is than has been previously acknowledged. This accomplishment can only hasten his reemergence as one of our most important observers of race in American culture.
Download or read book The Northern Stories of Charles W Chesnutt written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charles W. Chestnutt's Northern writings describe the ways in which America was reshaping itself at the turn of the 19th century. This collection of Chestnutt's Northern stories portray life in the North in the period between the Civil War and World War I.
Download or read book Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W Chesnutt written by Matthew Wilson and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 de-romanticizing 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. Matthew Wilson is a professor of humanities and writing at Penn State University, Harrisburg. He is the editor of Charles W. Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, F.M.C. (University Press of Mississippi).
Download or read book Charles Waddell Chesnutt Pioneer of the Color Line written by Helen M. Chesnutt and published by . This book was released on 1952 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The driving force in Chesnutt's life was the wish to help his race. Long before the days of the NAACP, which he later joined, and to the end of his life, he lectured, wrote,and corresponded on the everlasting problem." His letters reveal courage and good sense with which he faced racial discrimination." Originally published in 1952. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.
Download or read book Critical Essays on Charles W Chesnutt written by Joseph R. McElrath and published by Twayne Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present day. Each volume includes: -- An introduction providing the reader with a lucid overview of criticism from its beginnings -- illuminating controversies, evaluating approaches and sorting out the schools of thought -- The most influential reviews and the best reprinted scholarly essays -- A section devoted exclusively to reviews and reactions by the subject's contemporaries -- Original essays, new translations and revisions commissioned especially for the series -- Previously unpublished materials such as interviews, lost letters and manuscript fragments -- A bibliography of the subject's writings and interviews -- A name and subject index
Download or read book Chesnutt and Realism written by Ryan Simmons and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2006-08-08 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides an important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, scholars have paid little attention to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? As a writer whose career was restricted by the dismal racial politics of his era, Chesnutt refused to conform to literary conventions for depicting race. Nor did he use his imaginative skills to evade the realities he and other African Americans faced. Rather, he experimented with ways of portraying reality that could elicit an appropriate, proportionate response to it, as Ryan Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chesnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works overlooked by previous critics. In addition, Chesnutt and Realism addresses a curiously neglected subject in American literary studies—the relationship between American literary realism and race. By taking Chesnutt seriously as a contributor to realism, this book articulates the strategies by which one African American intellectual helped to define the discourses that influenced his fate.
Download or read book The Literary Career of Charles W Chesnutt written by William L. Andrews and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1999-03-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The career of any black writer in nineteenth-century American was fraught with difficulties, and William Andrews undertakes to explain how and why Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932) became the first Negro novelist of importance: “Steering a difficult course between becoming co-opted by his white literary supporters and becoming alienated from then and their access to the publishing medium, Chesnutt became the first Afro-American writer to use the white-controlled mass media in the service of serious fiction on behalf of the black community.” Awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1928 by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Chesnutt admitted without apologies that because of his own experiences, most of his writings concentrated on issue about racial identity. Only one-eighth Negro and able to pass for Caucasian, Chesnutt dramatized the dilemma of others like him. The House Behind the Cedars (1900), Chesnutt’s most autobiographical novel, evokes the world of “bright mulatto” caste in post-Civil War North Carolina and pictures the punitive consequences of being of mixed heritage. Chesnutt not only made a crucial break with many literary conventions regarding Afro-American life, crafting his authentic material with artistic distinction, he also broached the moral issue of the racial caste system and dared to suggest that a gradual blending of the races would alleviate a pernicious blight on the nation’s moral progress. Andrews argues that “along with Cable in The Grandissimes and Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chesnutt anticipated Faulkner in focusing on miscegenation, even more than slavery, as the repressed myth of the American past and a powerful metaphor of southern post-Civil War history.” Although Chesnutt’s career suffered setback and though he was faced with compromises he consistently saw America’s race problem as intrinsically moral rather than social or political. In his fiction he pictures the strengths of Afro-Americans and affirms their human dignity and heroic will. William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author’s times and of his total career. Though the scope of this book extends beyond textual criticism, the thoughtful discussions of Chesnutt’s works afford us a vivid and gratifying acquaintance with the fiction and also account for an important episode in American letters and history.
Download or read book The Progressive Movement written by Tim McNeese and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduced in the last decade of the 19th century as a direct response to the changes brought about by industrialization, the progressive movement helped reform the political process in the United States. This book brings the story of the progressive movement to life with photographs, concise text, and helpful features.
Download or read book The Colonel s Dream written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2018-09-20 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original: The Colonel ́s Dream by Charles W. Chesnutt
Download or read book The Progressive Movement 1900 1920 written by Charles Gibson and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
