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 William L. Andrews provides an account of essentially all that Chesnutt wrote, covering the unpublished manuscripts as well as the more successful efforts and viewing these materials in he context of the author’s times and of his total career.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 Literary Career of Charles W Chesnutt written by William L. Andrews and published by . This book was released on with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Literary Career of Charles W Chesnutt written by William L. Andrews and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Conjure Woman written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally released in 1899, this seminal collection of short stories present the complexities of the Black-American experience in the Postbellum South. Chesnutt's often subversive tales challenge popular representations of racial identity.
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 The Marrow of Tradition written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by Xist Publishing. This book was released on 2015-07-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Post Civil War Facts Are Entwined With Fiction “Looking at these two men with the American eye, the differences would perhaps be the more striking, or at least the more immediately apparent, for the first was white and the second black, or, more correctly speaking, brown...but both his swarthy complexion and his curly hair revealed what has been described in the laws of some of our states as a “visible admixture” of African blood.” - Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition In The Marrow of Tradition, Charles W. Chesnutt takes a page from the post- Civil War American history book and tries to bring it back to life so that the reader can truly understand the roots of race segregation. Set in the fictional southern town of Wellington, the action is based upon the real 1898 Wilmington insurrection that shook the American society to the ground. The novel takes the reader to uncharted territories where the emerging white aristocracy is trying to get rid of the ‘blacks’. This Xist Classics edition has been professionally formatted for e-readers with a linked table of contents. This eBook also contains a bonus book club leadership guide and discussion questions. We hope you’ll share this book with your friends, neighbors and colleagues and can’t wait to hear what you have to say about it. Xist Publishing is a digital-first publisher. Xist Publishing creates books for the touchscreen generation and is dedicated to helping everyone develop a lifetime love of reading, no matter what form it takes
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 The Goophered Grapevine written by Charles Waddell Chesnutt and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-01-06 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Squid Ink Classic includes the full text of the work plus MLA style citations for scholarly secondary sources, peer-reviewed journal articles and critical essays for when your teacher requires extra resources in MLA format for your research paper.
Download or read book The House Behind the Cedars written by Charles W. Chesnutt and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Compassionate Confrontation written by Marcia Burtt Frerichs and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Business Career written by and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-12 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 W Chesnutt written by J. Noel Heermance and published by [Hamden, Conn.] : Archon Books. This book was released on 1974 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of Chesnutt is both an appreciation of a unique artist and investigation of a whole culture. We are simultaneously taken into the past and led into our present lives. The writer, fighting against the prejudices and social indifference of his own world, mirrors closely the frailties and strengths of our own turbulent times. No author exists apart from his environment, that in which he is raised and that for which he later writes. The present work is not solely a biography and an examination of its subject's writings both quantitatively and qualitatively. It is also a full exposition of the period in which Chesnutt lived, a search for those complex and diverse sociological conditions which forged his strength and artistry. -- From publisher's description.
Download or read book The Absent Man written by Charles Duncan and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addressing the full range of Chesnutt's (1858-1932) short fiction, including the sixteen works collected in The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, Duncan (English, Peace College, Raleigh, North Carolina) addresses the relationship between Chesnutt's thematic designs and his sophisticated narrative presentations as well as the central role played by race in his short fiction. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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.
