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 Charles Chesnutt Reappraised written by David Garrett Izzo and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the best known and most widely read of early African American writers, Charles W. Chesnutt published more than fifty short stories, six novels, two plays, a biography of Frederick Douglass, and countless essays, poems, letters, journals, and speeches. Though he had light skin and was of mixed race, Chesnutt self-identified as a black man, and his writing was often boldly political, openly addressing problems of racial identity and injustice in the late 19th century. This collection of critical essays reevaluates the Chesnutt legacy, introducing new scholarship reflective of the many facets of his fiction, especially his sophisticated narrative strategies.
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 Stories Novels and Essays LOA 131 written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2002-01-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life. The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), is a study of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era. Nine uncollected short stories round out the volume's fiction, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman and two stories that are unavailable in any other edition. Eight essays highlight his prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book Collected Stories of Charles W Chesnutt written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Signet. This book was released on 1992 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credited with almost single-handedly pioneering a genuine African-American literary tradition in the short story, Chesnutt has influenced writers such as James Weldon Johnson and Charles Johnson. This collections contains all the stories in Chesnutt's two published volumes, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, along with two uncollected works.
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 132 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 Dividing Lines written by Andreá N Williams and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and lesser-known works of Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, showing how these texts mediate class through discussions of labor, moral respectability, ancestry, spatial boundaries, and skin complexion. Dividing Lines also draws on reader responses—from book reviews, editorials, and letters—to show how the class anxiety expressed in African American fiction directly sparked reader concerns over the status of black Americans in the U.S. social order. Weaving literary history with compelling textual analyses, this study yields new insights about the intersection of race and class in black novels and short stories from the 1880s to 1900s.
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 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 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 Edinburgh Companion to Nineteenth Century American Letters and Letter Writing written by Celeste-Marie Bernier and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-02-15 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This comprehensive study by leading scholars in an important new field-the history of letters and letter writing-is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics, history or literature. Because of its mass literacy, population mobility, and extensive postal system, nineteenth-century America is a crucial site for the exploration of letters and their meanings, whether they be written by presidents and statesmen, scientists and philosophers, novelists and poets, feminists and reformers, immigrants, Native Americans, or African Americans. This book breaks new ground by mapping the voluminous correspondence of these figures and other important American writers and thinkers. Rather than treating the letter as a spontaneous private document, the contributors understand it as a self-conscious artefact, circulating between friends and strangers and across multiple genres in ways that both make and break social ties.
Download or read book Speaking of Dialect written by Erik Redling and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 2006 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Portable Charles W Chesnutt written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-05-27 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection from one of our most influential African American writers An icon of nineteenth-century American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt, an incisive storyteller of the aftermath of slavery in the South, is widely credited with almost single-handedly inaugurating the African American short story tradition and was the first African American novelist to achieve national critical acclaim. This major addition to Penguin Classics features an ideal sampling of his work: twelve short stories (including conjure tales and protest fiction), three essays, and the novel The Marrow of Tradition. Published here for the 150th anniversary of Chesnutt's birth, The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt will bring to a new audience the genius of a man whose legacy underlies key trends in modern Black fiction. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance written by Cherene Sherrard-Johnson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-07-20 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance presents a comprehensive collection of original essays that address the literature and culture of the Harlem Renaissance from the end of World War I to the middle of the 1930s. Represents the most comprehensive coverage of themes and unique new perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance available Features original contributions from both emerging scholars of the Harlem Renaissance and established academic “stars” in the field Offers a variety of interdisciplinary features, such as the section on visual and expressive arts, that emphasize the collaborative nature of the era Includes “Spotlight Readings” featuring lesser known figures of the Harlem Renaissance and newly discovered or undervalued writings by canonical figures
Download or read book Sitting in Darkness written by Peter Schmidt and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sitting in Darkness explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely studied fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourgee, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. E. B. Du Bois are illuminated in significant new ways. The book's readings seek to synthesize developments in literary and cultural studies, ranging through New Criticism, New Historicism, postcolonial studies, black studies, and "whiteness" studies. This volume posits and answers significant questions. In what ways did the "uplift" projects of Reconstruction-their ideals and their contradictions-affect U.S. colonial policies in the new territories after 1898? How can fiction that treated these historical changes help us understand them? What relevance does this period have for us in the present, during a moment of great literary innovation and strong debate over how well the most powerful country in the world uses its resources?
Download or read book Playing the Races written by Henry B. Wonham and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-06-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in magazines and newspapers after the Civil War. Indeed, critics such as Alain Locke hailed realism's potential to accomplish "the artistic emancipation of the Negro," a project that logically extended to other groups systematically misrepresented in the comic imagery of the period. From the influential "Editor's Study" at Harper's Monthly, William Dean Howells touted the democratic impulse of realist imagery as an alternative to romanticism's "pride of caste," which is "averse to the mass of men" and "consents to know them only in some conventionalized and artificial guise." Yet if literary realism pursued the interests of democracy by affirming "the equality of things and the unity of men," why did its major practitioners, including Howells himself, regularly employ comic typification as a feature of their representational practice? Critics have often dismissed such apparent lapses in realist practice as blind spots, vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with realism's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. Henry B. Wonham argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the period's most demanding literary and graphic works. The seemingly anomalous presence of gross ethnic abstractions within works by Howells, Twain, James, Wharton, and Chesnutt hints at realism's vexed and complicated relationship with the caricatured ethnic images that played a central role in late nineteenth-century American thinking about race, identity, and national culture. In illuminating that relationship, Playing the Races offers a fresh understanding of the rich literary discourse conceived at the intersection of the realist and the caricatured image.
