[PDF] Passing In The Works Of Charles W Chesnutt eBook

Author : Susan Prothro Wright
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 147 pages
File Size : 22,53 MB
Release : 2010-06-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1604734183

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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.

Author : Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 204 pages
File Size : 46,79 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780822314240

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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.

Author : Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher : Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Page : 44 pages
File Size : 16,46 MB
Release : 2017-01-06
Category :
ISBN : 9781542405348

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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.

Author : Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher :
Page : 596 pages
File Size : 22,52 MB
Release : 1999-01-01
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780804735490

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Over the past decade, increasing attention has been paid to the life and work of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), considered by many the major African-American fiction writer before the Harlem Renaissance by virtue of the three novels and two collections of short stories he published between 1899 and 1905. Less familiar are the essays he wrote for American periodicals from 1899 through 1931, the majority of which are analyses of and protests against white racism. Collected as well in this volume are the addresses he made to both white and black audiences from 1881 through 1931, on topics ranging from race prejudice to the life and literary career of Alexandre Dumas. The 77 works included in this volume comprise all of Chesnutt’s known works of nonfiction, 38 of which are reprinted here for the first time. They reveal an ardent and often outraged spokesman for the African American whose militancy increased to such a degree that, by 1903, he had more in common with W. E. B. Du Bois than Booker T. Washington. He was, however, a lifelong integrationist and even an advocate of “race amalgamation,” seeing interracial marriage as the ultimate means of solving “the Negro Problem,” as it was termed at the end of the century. That he championed the African American during the Jim Crow era while opposing Black Nationalism and other “race pride” movements attests to the way Chesnutt defined himself as a controversial figure, in his time and ours. The essays and speeches in this volume are not, however, limited to polemical writings. An educator, attorney, and man of letters with wide-ranging interests, Chesnutt stands as a humanist addressing subjects of universal interest, including the novels of George Meredith, the accomplishments of Samuel Johnson, and the relationship between literature and life.

Author : Charles W. Chesnutt
Publisher : Courier Corporation
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 16,55 MB
Release : 2012-03-20
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0486121917

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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.

Author : William L. Andrews
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 316 pages
File Size : 26,73 MB
Release : 1999-03-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780807124529

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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.

Author : Maria Giulia Fabi
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 24,93 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780252026676

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Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel restores to its rightful place a body of American literature that has long been overlooked, dismissed, or misjudged. This insightful reconsideration of nineteenth-century African-American fiction uncovers the literary artistry and ideological complexity of a body of work that laid the foundation for the Harlem Renaissance and changed the course of American letters. Focusing on the trope of passing -- black characters lightskinned enough to pass for white -- M. Giulia Fabi shows how early African-American authors such as William Wells Brown, Frank J. Webb, Charles W. Chesnutt, Sutton E. Griggs, James Weldon Johnson, Frances E. W. Harper, and Edward A. Johnson transformed traditional representations of blackness and moved beyond the tragic mulatto motif. Celebrating a distinctive, African-American history, culture, and worldview, these authors used passing to challenge the myths of racial purity and the color line. Fabi examines how early black writers adapted existing literary forms, including the sentimental romance, the domestic novel, and the utopian novel, to express their convictions and concerns about slavery, segregation, and racism. She also gives a historical overview of the canon-making enterprises of African-American critics from the 1850s to the 1990s and considers how their concerns about crafting a particular image for African-American literature affected their perceptions of nineteenth-century black fiction.

Author : Charles Waddell Chesnutt
Publisher : ReadHowYouWant.com
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 40,68 MB
Release : 2008-11-05
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1442902914

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