Academic literature on the topic 'Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932'

Classical scholars have begun to delineate the dynamic pattern of black classicism. This new subfield of the classical tradition involves the analysis of the creative response to classical antiquity by artists as well as the history of the professional training in classics of scholars, teachers and students in high schools, colleges and universities. To the first group belongs Helen Maria Chesnutt (1880-1969). Born in Fayetteville, NC, Chesnutt was the second daughter of acclaimed African American novelist, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932). She earned her B.A. from Smith College in 1902 and her M.A. in Latin from Columbia University in 1925. She was a member of the American Philological Association and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Her life was spent teaching Latin at Central High School in Cleveland, OH. This is the first full scale account of her career.

This thesis argues that Charles W. Chesnutt's writings challenged the central assumptions of his America's racial thinking. An important part of this challenge is the difference between the two discourses which dominate The Conjure Woman. The first uses ethnographic discourse to create "the Other;" the second effaces the differences between himself and other Americans. Unlike most of the other writers of his period, Chesnutt shows African-American men and women to be fully developed moral, ethical and emotional individuals; in his works slave-holders and those who sought to "redeem" the South were morally and ethically underdeveloped. Both his writings and his career demonstrate that African-Americans were capable of prospering as independent actors in a free labor market. While critical of the actions of America's legal system, unlike many of his contemporaries, Chesnutt believed that injustice began when racial thinking led legal actors to deviate from the established rules of common law.

Analyzing Chesnutt's fiction from the angle of the West African trickster tradition explains the varying interpretations of his texts and his authorial intentions. The discussion also illustrates the influence that audience and editorial concerns may have had on African-American authors at the turn of the century.

L'étude des histoires éditoriales de "the Conjure Woman" de Charles W. CHesnutt (1858-1932) et de "Cane" de Jean Toomer (1894-1967), retrace le trajet et la formation de ces deux écrivains afro-américains jusqu'à leur accès à la publication. Figures pionières de la littérature noire américaine, ils furent respetivement publiès par la maison "mainstream Houghton, Miflin et Co. , et l'éditeur avant-gardiste Boni et Liveright. Confrontés à un lectorat majoritairement blanc e à la complexité des relations entre éditeurs blancs et écrivains noirs dans et à quelle conditions, purent-ils accèder à la publilcation ? Quelle influence eurent leurs origines de couleur ?

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-28T19:59:08Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Orison Marden Bandeira de Melo Junior.pdf: 822477 bytes, checksum: e35e8d22d9ae8fb3fb9c21cad662fdfc (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-12-06<br>Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico<br>The present research proposes a comparative study between O Mulato, by Aluísio Azevedo and The House Behind the Cedars, by Charles Chesnutt, aiming at verifying some evidence of race prejudice in the voice of the novels narrators. Due to that, I first tried to analyze some scientific theories which have defended the inferiority of the black race and their portrayal through various stereotypes found not only in the novels which constitute the corpus of this study, but also in some prior to them. Furthermore, I examined some concepts from Comparative Literature which guided not only the comparison between the two frontier novels but also the use of notions from Science, History and Religion. Thus, I verified that both narratives were analogous in various aspects, among which I mention: (1) small and prejudiced cities; (2) the chronological time of the plots determined by historical events; (3) thirdperson omniscient and intrusive narrators; (5) afro-descendent heroes portrayed with physical and cultural characteristics of white heroes; (6) the end of the heroes by death, and (7) interracial relationship as the intriguing element of racial discrimination portrayed in the novels. Among the individual characteristics of each book, I pointed out (1) the angle of vision in the narratives, since the world depicted in O Mulato is the world of white people whereas the world in The House Behind the Cedars is the world of black people, and (2) the consciousness of black ancestry, which is not found in the main character of the Brazilian novel and is always present in the main character of the American novel. Finally, I tried to answer the research question by concluding that I believe that there is a contradiction in the voice of the narrator, who, although telling a plot whose ideological function is to fight against race prejudice, corroborates the racist scientific theories by describing secondary characters in the narratives stereotypically and afro-descendent heroes with physical and cultural characteristics of white heroes<br>A presente pesquisa retrata a proposta de um estudo comparativista entre O Mulato, de Aluísio Azevedo e The House Behind the Cedars, de Charles Chesnutt, objetivando verificar algum indício de preconceito racial na voz do narrador dos romances. Diante disso, procurei, em primeiro lugar, analisar algumas teorias científicas que defendiam a inferioridade da raça negra e a sua representação na literatura através de vários estereótipos encontrados não só nas obras que se constituem o corpus deste trabalho, mas também em romances que os antecederam. Ademais, visitei alguns conceitos da literatura comparada que nortearam não só comparação entre esses dois romances de fronteira, como também a utilização de noções da ciência, da história e da religião. Verifiquei, assim, que as duas obras eram análogas em vários aspectos; entre eles, cito: (1) cidades pequenas e preconceituosas; (2) eventos históricos que determinavam o tempo cronológico das tramas; (3) narrador onisciente, em terceira pessoa e intruso; (4) narração com indícios de preconceito do narrador; (5) heróis afro-descendentes com características físicas e culturais de heróis brancos; (6) fim do herói pela morte e (7) relacionamento inter-racial como o elemento instigador do preconceito racial representado nos romances. Entre as características individuais de cada obra, apontei (1) o ângulo de visão de cada romance, já que o mundo representado em O Mulato é o mundo dos brancos, enquanto o de The House Behind the Cedars é o dos negros, e (2) a consciência da ascendência negra, ausente no protagonista da obra brasileira, mas sempre presente no da obra americana. Finalmente, procurei responder à pergunta de pesquisa, concluindo acreditar haver contradição na voz do narrador, que, apesar de narrar uma trama cuja função ideológica era combater o racismo, corrobora, na sua narrativa, as teorias científicas racistas, através da descrição estereotipada de personagens secundárias e da descrição dos heróis afro-descendentes com características físicas e culturais de heróis brancos

This essay contends that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "between men" thesis (1985) provides a particularly apt methodology for engaging The marrow of tradition (1901), a post-bellum novel concerned with the structure of the New South in the United States. While the novel contains myriad "between men" pairs, reading the homosocial bond between Lee Ellis and Tom Delamere has the potential to change the way we think about the novel's interest in the complex relationships among class, social mobility, race, whiteness, and the erotics of power. If "the political and the erotic necessarily obscure and misrepresent each other... in ways that offer important and shifting affordances to all parties in historical gender and class struggles," then we can read the Ellis/Tom/Clara erotic triangle as dramatizing the rise of a white middle class whose professional capital encroaches upon and supersedes the central role of a plantation based aristocracy without significantly challenging either the essential hierarchy of white over black or the bloody lynch law that helps enforce that hierarchy (Sedgwick 15). Sedgwick's broad definition of desire as "the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred, that shapes an important relationship" can usefully be applied to the rivalry between Lee Ellis and Tom Delamere, a rivalry that epitomizes the Girardian theory that "the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle [is] stronger [and] more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved" (Sedgwick 21). An examination of the erotic triangle and the function of the courtship plot enable us to theorize the implications of this expropriation of the aristocrat by the white southern middle class and this ascendant class's role in remaking a whiteness that at the novel's end still reigns supreme.<br>text

“Human/Nature: American Literary Naturalism and the Anthropocene” examines works of fiction from the genre of American literary naturalism that sought to represent the emergence of the environmental crisis known today as the Anthropocene. Reading works by Jack London, Frank Norris, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charles W. Chesnutt, I show how the genre’s well-known tropes of determinism, atavism, and super-individual scales of narration were used to create narratives across vast scales of space and time, spanning the entire planet as well as multi-epochal stretches of geologic time. This reading expands existing definitions of American literary naturalism through a combination of literary analysis, engagement with contemporary theory, and discussion of the historical context of proto-Anthropocenic theories of the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Whereas most earlier understandings of naturalism have focused on human nature as it is determined by environmental conditions, I follow the inverse: the impact of collective human action on the physical environment. Previous definitions of naturalism have only told part of the story of determinism, making it impossible to recognize until now the genre’s unusual capacity to aesthetically capture humanity’s pervasive impact on the planet. Each of the dissertation’s four chapters focuses on a single author, a single aesthetic strategy, and a single problematic in Anthropocene discourse. My first chapter argues that Jack London’s late work (1906–1916) balanced his attempts to understand the human as a species with a growing interest in sustainable agriculture, resulting in a planetary theorization of environmental destruction through careless cultivation. But London’s human-centered environmental thinking ultimately served his well-known white supremacism, substantiating recent critiques that the Anthropocene’s universalism merely reproduces historical structures of wealth and power. Rather than the human per se, Frank Norris put his focus on finance capitalism in his classic 1901 novel The Octopus, embodying the hybrid human/natural force that he saw expanding over the face of the planet in the figure of the Wheat, a cultivated yet inhuman force that is as much machine as it is nature. I show how Norris turned Joseph LeConte’s proto-Anthropocenic theory of the Psychozoic era (1877) into a Capitalocene aesthetics, a contradictory sublimity in which individuals are both crushed by and feel themselves responsible for the new geologic force transforming the planet. While London and Norris focus on the destructive capacities of human agency, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 novel Herland takes a utopian approach, depicting a society of women with total control of their environment that anticipates conceptions of a “good Anthropocene.” Gilman built on the theories of sociologist and paleobotanist Lester Ward as well as her own experience in the domestic reform movement to imagine a garden world where the human inhabitants become totally integrated into the non-human background. Yet Gilman’s explicitly eugenic system flattens all heterogeneity of culture, wealth, and power into a homogenous collective. My final chapter builds on the critique of the Anthropocene’s universalism that runs through the preceding chapters by asking whether and how the Anthropocene can be approached with more nuance and less recourse to universals. I find an answer in the stories of Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Conjure Woman (1899) and the theory of the Plantationocene, which sees the sameness of the Anthropocene not as “natural” but as produced by overlapping forms of racial, economic, and biological oppression. Registering this production of homogeneity and its counterforces at once, Chesnutt models what I call Anthropocene heteroglossia, juxtaposing multiple dialects and narrative forms in stories set on a former plantation, depicting heterogeneous social ecologies as they conflict and coexist in markedly anthropogenic environments.

This dissertation reconsiders the relationship between fiction and slavery in American literary culture. “Prisoners of Style” shows how writers from the middle of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, including Hannah Crafts, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, and William Faulkner, wrestled with enslavement. They found it not only a subject to be written about, but also a problem of characterization. Slavery and the ontological sorcery through which it produced a new kind of individual—the individual who is also a thing—led these authors to rethink basic formal assumptions about realist fiction, especially about what constitutes a literary character. The writers I discuss did not set out to argue for the slave’s humanity or to render her interiority, but instead sought to represent the systematic unmaking of black personhood perpetrated by the laws and institutions that governed chattel slavery in the US. They set out to reveal the ideological violence perpetrated against enslaved blacks, and they did so by writing characters who embodied the categorical uncertainty of the slave, characters who were not allegories for real, full people. The tradition of writing I describe does not represent the fullness of enslaved “persons”; instead it renders something far more abstract: the epistemology that undergirded enslavement—those patterns of thought that preconditioned slavery itself. The authors I study understood fictionality as a thorny ethical, epistemological, and political problem. In my chapter on Crafts, for example, I look at The Bondwoman’s Narrative alongside a set of non-fiction texts about Jane Johnson, the slave who preceded her in John Hill Wheeler’s household. Reading the novel against legal documents, pamphlets, and histories about Johnson and her escape from Wheeler, the chapter explores what fiction could do that these other modes of writing could not. In moments of sleep, amnesia, and daydreaming, Crafts resists the normative logic of subjecthood and individual rights that underpins the representations of Johnson. In the second half of the project, I demonstrate the significance of fictionality to American literary realism’s evolution into modernism. The final chapter, on Faulkner, places two of his Yoknapatawpha novels within the context of his interest in modernist painting and sculpture. Work by Picasso, Matisse, and other visual artists inspired his concern with surfaces and flatness, leading to a meditation on artifice that runs throughout his major novels. I argue that his flatness—his insistence on the non-referential quality of fiction—is crucial for understanding his characterization and philosophy of history history, in particular the history of Southern plantation slavery.