Despite being the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation--including generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day--Charles Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous position in the canon of black literature. His relative place is, oddly enough, probably higher in the canon of American literature than it is in African-American literature. One reason for this anomaly may be that the sophisticated use of narrative techniques in his short fiction shielded Chesnutt's own views from the reader, a literary stance that does not lend itself to the sort of unambiguous political readings that so often characterize the "rediscovery" of black texts in the last thirty years. / Chesnutt's virtuosity in creating a rich diversity of voices in his short fiction allows him to explore the parameters of identity for both blacks and whites at the turn of the century in a comprehensive and complex fashion. No writer of his time can speak so convincingly for such a wide variety of people: His works articulate the lives of slaves in the antebellum South, of poor whites during Reconstruction, and of rich mulattoes in the industrial North, to name only a few. Taken collectively, in fact, his canon of short fiction might be the most accomplished performance of what in today's parlance would be called multiculturalism. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2389. / Major Professor: Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77202 |
| Contributors | Duncan, Charles Stuart., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 246 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
Page generated in 0.0021 seconds