Chesnutt and Realism

Chesnutt and Realism PDF Author: Ryan Simmons
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817315209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
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response to it, as Ryan Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chesnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works overlooked by previous critics.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.

Chesnutt and Realism

Chesnutt and Realism PDF Author: Ryan Simmons
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817315209
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

Get Book

Book Description
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response to it, as Ryan Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chesnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works overlooked by previous critics.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.

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race PDF Author: Dean McWilliams
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327247
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
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.

The Marrow of Tradition

The Marrow of Tradition PDF Author: Charles W. Chesnutt
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 035987892X
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Chesnutt's novel, originally published in 1901, depicts the rise of the white supremacist movement after the failure of southern Reconstruction and led to the bloody tragedy of the Wilmington race riots.

The Passing of Grandison

The Passing of Grandison PDF Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781542405348
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
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.

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race

Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race PDF Author: Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080717341X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Winner of the SAMLA Studies Award Honorable Mention for the MLA William Sanders Scarborough Prize From the 1880s to the early 1900s, a particularly turbulent period of U.S. race relations, the African American novel provided a powerful counternarrative to dominant and pejorative ideas about blackness. In Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus uncovers how black and white writers experimented with innovative narrative strategies to revise static and stereotypical views of black identity and experience. In this provocative and challenging book, Daniels-Rauterkus contests the long-standing idea that African Americans did not write literary realism, along with the inverse misconception that white writers did not make important contributions to African American literature. Taking up key works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain, Daniels-Rauterkus argues that authors blended realism with romance, often merging mimetic and melodramatic conventions to advocate on behalf of African Americans, challenge popular theories of racial identity, disrupt the expectations of the literary marketplace, and widen the possibilities for black representation in fiction. Combining literary history with close textual analysis, Daniels-Rauterkus reads black and white writers alongside each other to demonstrate the reciprocal nature of literary production. Moving beyond discourses of racial authenticity and cultural property, Daniels-Rauterkus stresses the need to organize African American literature around black writers and their meditations on blackness, but she also proposes leaving space for nonblack writers whose use of comparable narrative strategies can facilitate reconsiderations of the complex social order that constitutes race in America. With Afro-Realisms and the Romances of Race, Daniels-Rauterkus expands critical understandings of American literary realism and African American literature by destabilizing the rigid binaries that too often define discussions of race, genre, and periodization.

An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932

An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932 PDF Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804745086
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
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.

The Colonel ́s Dream

The Colonel ́s Dream PDF Author: Charles W. Chesnutt
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3734024951
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Reproduction of the original: The Colonel ́s Dream by Charles W. Chesnutt

The Goophered Grapevine

The Goophered Grapevine PDF Author: Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781542405546
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 36

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Book Description
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.

Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches

Charles W. Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches PDF Author: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804744324
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
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.

A Business Career

A Business Career PDF Author:
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781617030697
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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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.