Walter Hines Page Letters to Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Walter Hines Page Letters to Charles Waddell Chesnutt PDF Author: Walter Hines Page
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Typescript transcript copies of letters from Page to Chesnutt concerning publishing Chesnutt's writings. During these years, Page held positions at the Atlantic Monthly, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper & Brothers, and Doubleday, Page & Company.

Walter Hines Page Letters to Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Walter Hines Page Letters to Charles Waddell Chesnutt PDF Author: Walter Hines Page
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Typescript transcript copies of letters from Page to Chesnutt concerning publishing Chesnutt's writings. During these years, Page held positions at the Atlantic Monthly, Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Harper & Brothers, and Doubleday, Page & Company.

"To Be an Author"

Author: Joseph R. McElrath Jr.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400864488
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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.

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.

Charles Waddell Chesnutt

Charles Waddell Chesnutt PDF Author: Helen M. Chesnutt
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469640201
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
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.

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.

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900

Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 PDF Author: Sandra M. Gustafson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192884778
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Peace in the US Republic of Letters, 1840-1900 explores the early peace movement as it captured the imagination of leading writers. The book charts the rise of the peace cause from its sources in the works of William Penn and John Woolman, through the founding of the first peace societies in 1815 and the mid-century peace congresses, to the postbellum movement's consequential emphasis on arbitration. The Civil War is the central axis for the book, with three chapters organized around readings of novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne spanning the period from 1840 to 1865. Cooper had personal connections to the movement and thought deeply about the issues it addressed. Literary interest in peace at times overlapped with abolitionism, as was true for Stowe. And, in the case of Hawthorne, attention to peace advocacy arose out of a mixture of skepticism regarding perfectionist impulses, a desire to explore the nature and limits of violence, and fear of civil conflict. The volume also explores fiction engaged with problems that arose in the aftermath of that war, including novels by Henry Adams and John Hay on political corruption and class conflict; works on the failures of Reconstruction by Albion Tourgée and Charles Chesnutt; and the varied treatments of Indigenous experience in Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Simon Pokagon's Queen of the Woods. All of these writers focused on issues related to the cause of peace, expanding its thematic reach and anticipating key insights of twentieth-century peace scholars.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt PDF Author: Matthew Wilson
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9781604732481
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
An examination of race and audience in an American innovator's writings

Cultures of Letters

Cultures of Letters PDF Author: Richard H. Brodhead
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226075266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Richard H. Brodhead uses a great variety of historical sources, many of them considered here for the first time, to reconstruct the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of the post-Civil War decades, and the literary culture of post-emancipation black education. Moving across a range of writers familiar and unfamiliar, and relating groups of writers often considered in artificial isolation, Brodhead describes how these socially structured worlds of writing shaped the terms of literary practice for the authors who inhabited them.

The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt

The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt PDF Author: William L. Andrews
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 9780807124529
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
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.

The Dream of the Great American Novel

The Dream of the Great American Novel PDF Author: Lawrence Buell
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727487
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
“Magisterial . . . make[s] you suddenly see new things in familiar books . . . brilliant analyses of a dozen or so front-runners in the Great American Novel sweepstakes.” —Michael Dirda, Virginia Quarterly Review The idea of “the great American novel” continues to thrive almost as vigorously as in its nineteenth-century heyday, defying more than 150 years of attempts to dismiss it as amateurish or obsolete. In this landmark book, the first in many years to take in the whole sweep of national fiction, Lawrence Buell reanimates this supposedly antiquated idea, demonstrating that its history is a key to the dynamics of national literature and national identity itself. The dream of the G.A.N., as Henry James nicknamed it, crystallized soon after the Civil War. In fresh, in-depth readings of selected contenders from the 1850s onward in conversation with hundreds of other novels, Buell delineates four “scripts” for G.A.N. candidates and their themes, illustrated by such titles as The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Beloved, Moby-Dick, and Gravity’s Rainbow—works dwelling on topics from self-invention to the promise and pitfalls of democracy. The canvas of the great American novel is in constant motion, reflecting revolutions in fictional fashion, the changing face of authorship, and the inseparability of high culture from popular. As Buell reveals, the elusive G.A.N. showcases the myth of the United States as a nation perpetually under construction. “Engaging and provocative . . . ultimately affirms the importance of literature to a nation’s sense of itself.” —Sarah Graham, Times Literary Supplement “Rich in critical insight . . . Buell wonders if the GAN isn’t stirring again in surprising new developments in science fiction. An impressively ambitious literary survey.” —Booklist (starred review)