No description available.

Univ., Diss.--Augsburg.

No description available.

Zugl.: Augsburg, Univ., Diss., 2003

In this article, I read Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901) against the background of realism to unravel the novel’s distinct critique of racial discourse. I argue that realism’s characteristic technique of appealing to the visible to establish the reality and realness of its fictions enables the novel to trace a similar operation in the discourse of race. My focus rests on the novel’s treatment of two pairs of characters that challenge the visual confidence of both realism and race, pairs that exemplify what Samira Kawash has called 'interracial twins:' sets of characters whose parties 'actually,' ostensibly belong to different 'races,' yet whom the text presents as strikingly similar in their appearance. In its characterization of and narratives surrounding these 'twins,' the novel exposes the techniques by which racial discourse naturalizes itself and unmasks race as a textual construct, generated by stories and documents that dangerously sustain a reality of their own. / Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich.

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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Eastern Illinois University, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 59-61).

<p>While William Dean Howells's influence in nineteenth-century American Realism is indisputable, this thesis will explain why seeing Howellsian Realism as the gold standard of Realism is not an equitable approach to defining the genre or understanding its social impact. This thesis uses literary historicism to examine, through the literary career of Charles W. Chesnutt, the way Black authors of the nineteenth century had to navigate writing Realism for an audience that was immersed in minstrelsy and was therefore misinformed about Black life and Black culture. This project questions the exclusivity of viewing Realism as the “House of Howells” and asks in what ways that exclusivity affects Black writers’ voices and literary futures. </p>

No description available.

No description available.