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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 The published canon of Chesnutt's work has doubled in the last decade: three novels completed but unpublished in Chesnutt's life have appeared, as have scholarly editions of Chesnutt's journals, his letters, and his essays.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.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view-scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary-they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities-a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today. Universes without Usexplores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither \"other\" nor \"mirror.\" Instead, humans are enmeshed with \"alien\" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of \"us.\" By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it. Universes without Usdemonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman.

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life. Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnuttis the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt's novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt's lifetime-The House Behind the Cedars,The Marrow of Tradition, andThe Colonel's Dream-as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience. Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience. Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt's career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt's views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt's unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America's most significant writers on the subject. Matthew Wilson is a professor of humanities and writing at Penn State University, Harrisburg. He is the editor ofCharles W. Chesnutt's Paul Marchand, F.M.C.(University Press of Mississippi).

An important examination of Charles Chesnutt as a practitioner of realism.   With the release of previously unpublished novels and a recent proliferation of critical studies on his life and work, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) has emerged as a major American writer of his time—the age of Howells, Twain, and Wharton. In Chesnutt and Realism, Ryan Simmons breaks new ground by theorizing how understandings of literary realism have shaped, and can continue to shape, the reception of Chesnutt’s work.   Although Chesnutt is typically acknowledged as the most prominent African American writer of the realist period, little attention has been paid to the central question of this study: what does it mean to call Chesnutt a realist? A writer whose career was circumscribed 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 Simmons demonstrates in extended readings of each of Chestnutt’s novels, including important unpublished works that have been overlooked by previous critics.   Chesnutt and Realism also 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.   

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.

Charles W. Chesnutt constructs the sound of whiteness in The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition by situating character language within emerging frameworks of racial \"impressibility.\" House explores the lives of two siblings, John and Rena, whose racial passing Chesnutt registers, in part, through the siblings' language practices. Marrow , on the other hand, introduces a different type of \"passing\" character, the cruel Colonel McBane, whose speech patterns Chesnutt associates with, and uses to critique, anti-black violence perpetrated by the \"po' white\" class. Both novels critique the color line by participating in the popular nineteenth-century racial discourse of sentimental biopower and impressibility, as identified by Kyla Schuller. In the biopower regime Schuller describes, racial hierarchies rest on differing capacities of bodies to absorb sensations and stimuli and adapt. In Marrow and House , these capacities are underscored through language metaphor and linguistic characterization, part of Chesnutt's complex, longstanding inquiry into the relationship between language and race.

[...]he does not anticipate the fierce opposition waged against him by those who have thrived in his absence and who fervently resent and reject his attempts to bring Northern ideas to North Carolina. In Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race, McWilliams examines the author's engagement with the railroad in his 1901 novel, The Marrow of Tradition, arguing that it operated as an ideal symbol for Chesnutt's literary ends: \"The velocity of steam-powered travel, the rapid movement of people across political and cultural boundaries, intensified the violent collision of conflicting ideologies\" (148).3 This is likewise consistent with The Colonel's Dream, in which the protagonist repeatedly encounters and clashes with Southern prejudices and corrupt institutions that are, more often than not, entangled with the railroad industry in some way. In Chesnutt's estimation of the \"separate but equal\" legislation in action, there appear to be only three capacities in which a black person is allowed to inhabit the public space of the railroad: in either subservient or backbreaking employment (e.g., nurse, attendant, porter, cook, track-layer); travelling as passengers in separate cars with grossly inferior accommodations; or in irons, paraded and transported as criminal cargo through convict-lease labor and the debt-slavery system of peonage, which, despite having been outlawed decades earlier in 1867, continued well into the twentieth century. Werner Sollors calls attention to Chesnutt's \"extraordinary sense of the history that he was living and that lay behind him,\" a statement that rings especially true of The Colonels Dream.5 The verdict of the 1883 Civil Rights Cases - in which the Supreme Court ruled the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional - had been a destructive precursor to Plessy that essentially gutted congressional power and protection under the Fourteenth Amendment by granting individual states the freedom to deny the freedoms of others as they saw fit.

The ironic juxtapositions of similar scenes and characters in The Marrow of Tradition show that people in comparable life situations will experience different outcomes depending on their race. For example, whether a person is Black or White determines the consequences that ensue if that person resorts to violence, even if it can be justified as self-defense. This novel, by Charles W. Chesnutt, is based on the political insurrection of 1898 in which White supremacists overthrew the municipal government of Wilmington, North Carolina. The workings of the plot suggest an endorsement of the viewpoint of Josh Green, a Black dock worker who believes in the need for retaliatory violence. Green's position is contrasted with, and in novelistic terms gets the better of, the pacifist and more intellectual view of William Miller, the town's prominent Black doctor. Though less explicitly so, Green's and Miller's views may also be interpreted as representative of a contest between the merits of race consciousness and assimilation, respectively. In his essays, Chesnutt speaks clearly in favor of \"sameness\" and color-blindness as a principle, so he is closer to Miller on this issue. However, in his later literary career and even in certain aspects of this novel, one can see sympathy for characters who define themselves in part by their membership in the Black community.

[...]their actions echo those of traditional vampires: any concern for physical well-being was directly tied to the individual's ability to provide the labor (sustaining blood) which the system of slavery rested. [...]many of the punishments and other physical violations that occurred were designed specifically to cause dis-ease and to induce acquiescence in those enslaved. The buying and selling of human beings obviously reinforce the idea of slavery as a vampire that sucks the life blood out of persons of African descent, for it unconscionably separates parents and children, wives and husbands, and those with any other relationship bonds. [...]of selling and buying Henry, Mars Dugal' earns enough money to buy another plantation. \" \" THE BUYING AND SELLING OF HUMAN BEINGS OBVIOUSLY REINFORCE THE IDEA OF SLAVERY AS A VAMPIRE THAT SUCKS THE LIFE BLOOD OUT OF PERSONS OF AFRICAN DESCENT, FOR IT UNCONSCIONABLY SEPARATES PARENTS AND CHILDREN, WIVES AND HUSBANDS, AND THOSE WITH ANY OTHER RELATIONSHIP BONDS.