Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt
- Editors: Susanna Ashton, Bill Hardwig
- Pages: 190
- Published: 2017
- ISBN: 9781603293327 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603293310 (Hardcover)
“An outstanding anthology of erudite and insightful articles by an impressive roster of contributors . . . very highly recommended for both college and university library collections.”
—Library Bookwatch
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.
Winner of the Sylvia Lyons Render Award from the Charles W. Chesnutt Association
Katherine Adams
Susanna Ashton
Margaret D. Bauer
Ernestine Pickens Glass
William Gleason
George Gordon-Smith
Jennifer Riddle Harding
Bill Hardwig
Sarah Ingle
Kathryn S. Koo
Gregory Laski
Janaka Lewis
Trinyan Paulsen Mariano
Jeffrey W. Miller
Shirley Moody-Turner
Marisa Parham
Hollis Robbins
Francesca Sawaya
Ryan Simmons
Mark Sussman
Sarah Wagner-McCoy
Brian Yothers
Mary E. Brown Zeigler
Introduction (1)
PART ONE: MATERIALS
Critical Reception (11)
Available Editions (13)
Archive Resources for Teachers (15)
Chronology (16)
PART TWO: APPROACHES
The Challenge of Teaching Chesnutt: An Introduction to the Essays (21)
Engaging the Dialect
Toward a Usable Dialect: Chesnutt’s Language in the Classroom (26)
Releasing the Linguistic Shackles: Chesnutt’s Verbal and Nonverbal Discourse (33)
Teaching the Shorter Works
Visualizing the Landscape of Slavery: Architecture and the Built Environment in the Conjure Stories (41)
Teaching Chesnutt’s Ghosts (49)
Teaching Chesnutt’s Conjure Woman through Its Publication History (54)
The Gothic Grapevine: Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales as Gothic Fiction (62)
Women in Chesnutt’s Short Fiction: Canons, Connections, Classrooms (68)
Dumb Witnesses: Teaching Speech and Silence in the Short Fiction (73)
Teaching Chesnutt’s “The Bouquet”: Combining History and Fiction (80)
Chesnutt as Cultural Critic (85)
“[T]o Remove the Disability of Color”: Chesnutt in the Context of the American Eugenics Movement (91)
Teaching the Novels
The Marrow of Allusion: Ivanhoe and The House behind the Cedars (98)
Teaching The House behind the Cedars in an Introductory Literary Theory Course (107)
Rebooting Race: Virtuality and Embodiment in The House behind the Cedars (114)
Fact into Fiction: Teaching Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and the 1898 Wilmington Coup d’État (124)
Chesnutt as Political Theorist: Imagining Democracy and Social Justice in the Literature Classroom (130)
Persons in the Balance: The Scale of Justice in Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (138)
Teaching “The Sheriff’s Children,” “The Wife of His Youth,” and The Marrow of Tradition in the United States–Mexico Borderlands (147)
Teaching Whiteness, Folklore, and the Discourses of Race in The Colonel’s Dream (152)
American Sentimentalism and The Colonel’s Dream (159)
Economics, Race, and Social (In)Justice: Teaching The Colonel’s Dream (168)
Notes on Contributors (175)
Works Cited (179)
Index (191)
“This collection goes a long way in engaging the depth and complexity of Chesnutt’s oeuvre, and it focuses on the challenges and joys of teaching his work to a diverse undergraduate population.”
—Tess Chakkalakal, Bowdoin College
