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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 w...
«America is now wholly given over to a d - d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash...» Taking Hawthorne's famous 1855 complaint about women writers as a starting point for consideration, Scribbling Women and the Short Story Form is a collection of fourteen critical essays about the short fiction of British and American women writers. This anthology takes a feminist approach, examining the liberating possibilities for women writers of the form of the short story, a genre often associated with alienation or subversion (the writer Frank O'Connor describes the form as marginal or «outlaw»). Covering the work of selected women writers from the 1850s through the late twentieth century, this collection includes essays on well-known authors such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, Flannery O'Connor, Cynthia Ozick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, alongside essays on Harriett Prescott Spofford, Ruth Stewart, L. T. Meade, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zitkala-Sa, Sui Sin Far, and Lydia Davis, less-known authors whose stories offer rich ground for consideration.
Shape Shifters presents a wide-ranging array of essays that examine peoples of mixed racial identity. Moving beyond the static “either/or” categories of racial identification found within typical insular conversations about mixed-race peoples, Shape Shifters explores these mixed-race identities as fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. This volume expands our understandings of how individuals and ethnic groups identify themselves within their own sociohistorical contexts. The essays in Shape Shifters explore different historical eras and reach across the globe, from the Roman and Chinese borderlands of classical antiquity to medieval Eurasian shape shifters, the Native pe...
For most historians, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the hostilities of the Civil War and the dashed hopes of Reconstruction give way to the nationalizing forces of cultural reunion, a process that is said to have downplayed sectional grievances and celebrated racial and industrial harmony. In truth, says Natalie J. Ring, this buoyant mythology competed with an equally powerful and far-reaching set of representations of the backward Problem South—one that shaped and reflected attempts by northern philanthropists, southern liberals, and federal experts to rehabilitate and reform the country’s benighted region. Ring rewrites the history of sectional reconciliation and...
Contributions by Ruth R. Caillouet, Mary C. Carruth, Nancy Dixon, Kathleen Downes, Edward J. Dupuy, Shari Evans, Paul Fess, Carina Evans Hoffpauir, Leslie Petty, Heidi Podlasi-Labrenz, Tierney S. Powell, Shanna M. Salinas, Matthew Teutsch, and Marcus Charles Tribbett Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History examines a rich combination of writers and texts, from antebellum works like Martin R. Delany’s novel, Blake, and the poetry of Les Cenelles to Patricia Smith’s recent collection of poems, Blood Dazzler. The thirteen essays in Voices and Visions treat two hundred years of literature and include discussions on canonical, contemporary, and experimental writers. Autho...
Explores how the trope of racial passing continues to serve as a touchstone for gauging public beliefs and anxieties about race in this multiracial era. The first volume to focus on the trope of racial passing in novels, memoirs, television, and films published or produced between 1990 and 2010, Passing Interest takes the scholarly conversation on passing into the twenty-first century. With contributors working in the fields of African American studies, American studies, cultural studies, film studies, literature, and media studies, this book offers a rich, interdisciplinary survey of critical approaches to a broad range of contemporary passing texts. Contributors frame recent passing texts ...
Contributions by Christina M. Chica, Kathryn Coto, Sarah Park Dahlen, Preethi Gorecki, Tolonda Henderson, Marcia Hernandez, Jackie C. Horne, Susan E. Howard, Peter C. Kunze, Florence Maätita, Sridevi Rao, Kallie Schell, Jennifer Patrice Sims, Paul Spickard, Lily Anne Welty Tamai, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Jasmine Wade, Karin E. Westman, and Charles D. Wilson Race matters in the fictional Wizarding World of the Harry Potter series as much as it does in the real world. As J. K. Rowling continues to reveal details about the world she created, a growing number of fans, scholars, readers, and publics are conflicted and concerned about how the original Wizarding World—quintessentially white and B...
Growing up in Cleveland after the Civil War and during the brutal rollback of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, Charles W. Chesnutt could have passed as white but chose to identify himself as black. An intellectual and activist involved with the NAACP who engaged in debate with Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, he wrote fiction and essays that addressed issues as various as segregation, class among both blacks and whites, Southern nostalgia, and the Wilmington coup d'état of 1898. The portrayals of race, racial violence, and stereotyping in Chesnutt's works challenge teachers and students to contend with literature as both a social and an ethical practice. In part 1 of this volume, "Materials," the editors survey the critical reception of Chesnutt's works in his lifetime and after, along with the biographical, critical, and archival texts available to teachers and students. The essays in part 2, "Approaches," address such topics in teaching Chesnutt as his use of dialect, the role of intertextuality and genre in his writing, irony, and his treatment of race, economics, and social justice.
Gale Researcher Guide for: Unsettling the "Marrow-Bones": Race and Resistance in the Fiction of Charles Chesnutt is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
One of the most extensive studies of class in nineteenth-century African American literature to date, Dividing Lines unveils how black fiction writers represented the uneasy relationship between class differences, racial solidarity, and the quest for civil rights in black communities. By portraying complex, highly stratified communities with a growing black middle class, these authors dispelled notions that black Americans were uniformly poor or uncivilized. The book argues that the signs of class anxiety are embedded in postbellum fiction: from the verbal stammer or prim speech of class-conscious characters to fissures in the fiction's form. Andreá N. Williams delves into the familiar and ...