Stories, novels & essays: The conjure woman ; The wife of his youth and other stories of the color line ; The house behind the cedars ; The marrow of tradition ; Uncollected stories ; Selected essays / Charles W. Chesnutt. [print]

Edited by Werner Sollors.

The conjure woman. The goophered grapevine Po' Sandy Mars Jeems's nightmare The conjurer's revenge Sis' Becky's pickaninny The gray wolf's ha'nt Hot-foot Hannibal.

The wife of his youth and other stories of the color line. The wife of his youth Her Virginia mammy The sheriff's children A matter of principle Cicely's dream The passing of Grandison Uncle Wellington's wives The bouquet The web of circumstance.

The house behind the cedars.

The marrow of tradition.

Uncollected stories. Dave's neckliss A deep sleeper Lonesome Ben The dumb witness The march of progress Baxter's Procrustes The doll White weeds The kiss.

Selected essays. What is a white man? The future American Superstitions and folk-lore of the South Charles W. Chesnutt's own view of his new story, The marrow of tradition The disfranchisement of the Negro The courts and the Negro Post-bellum--Pre-Harlem.

Publisher description: Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with searching explorations of the meaning of race and innovative use of African American speech and folklore. Rejecting genteel Victorian hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and "passing," Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of Jim Crow with novels and stories of formal clarity-creating, in the process, the modern African American novel. The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public as a writer of "conjure" tales, stories that explore black folklore and supernaturalism. That same year, he published The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line, stories set in Chesnutt's native North Carolina that dramatize the legacies of slavery and Reconstruction at the turn of the century. His first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) tells, as no previous novel ever had, of racial passing. The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt's masterpiece, is a powerful and bitter novel about the harsh reassertion of white dominance in a southern town at the end of the Reconstruction era, based largely on the Wilmington race riot. Nine uncollected short stories, including conjure tales omitted from The Conjure Woman, round out a selection of the author's fiction. Eight essays highlight Chesnutt's prescient views on the paradoxes of race relations in America and the definition of race itself.

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