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Author Chesnutt, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932, author

Title The conjure woman, and other conjure tales / Charles W. Chesnutt ; edited and with an introduction by Richard H. Brodhead
Published Durham, N.C. : Duke University Press, 1993

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Description 1 online resource (207 pages)
Series Book collections on Project MUSE
Contents 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 -- Related tales. Dave's neckliss ; A deep sleeper ; Lonesome Ben ; The dumb witness ; A victim of heredity, or, Why the darkey loves chicken ; Tobe's tribulations ; The marked tree
Summary The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Lesser known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms a part. It allows the reader to see how the original volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work.In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman.Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century
Analysis English fiction Short stories
United States
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 27-28)
Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL
digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL
Print version record
Subject African Americans -- Fiction
FICTION -- General.
FICTION / General
African Americans
Manners and customs
Tovenaars.
SUBJECT Southern States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Subject Southern States
Genre/Form Fiction
Fiction.
Short stories.
Nouvelles.
Romans.
Short stories.
short stories.
Short stories.
Form Electronic book
Author Brodhead, Richard H., 1947- editor.
LC no. 93004215
ISBN 9780822377795
0822377799