| Contents |
Part one : Materials -- Part two : Approaches. The challenge of teaching Chesnutt : an introduction to the essays -- Toward a usable dialect : Chesnutt's language in the classroom / Jeffrey W. Miller -- Releasing the linguistic shackles : Chesnutt's verbal and nonverbal discourse / Mary E. Brown Zeigler -- Visualizing the landscape of slavery : architecture and the build environment in the conjure stories / William Gleason -- Teaching Chesnutt's ghosts / Janaka Lewis -- Teaching Chesnutt's Conjure woman through its publication history / Kathryn S. Koo -- The gothic grapevine : Chesnutt's conjure tales as gothic fiction / Sarah Ingle -- Women in Chesnutt's short fiction : canons, connections, classrooms / Jennifer Riddle Harding -- Dumb witnesses : teaching speech and silence in the short fiction / Sarah Wagner-McCoy -- Teaching Chesnutt's "The bouquet" : combining history and fiction / Ernestine Pickens Glass -- Chesnutt as cultural critic / Mark Sussman -- "[T]o remove the disability of color" : Chesnutt in the context of the American eugenics movement / George Gordon-Smith -- The marrow of allusion : Ivanhoe and The house behind the cedars / Hollis Robbins -- Teaching The house behind the cedars in an introductory literary theory course / Ryan Simmons -- Rebooting race : virtuality and embodiment in The house behind the cedars / Marisa Parham -- Fact into fiction : teaching Chesnutt's The marrow of tradition and the 1898 Wilmington coup d'État / Margaret D. Bauer -- Chesnutt as political theorist : imagining democracy and social justice in the literature classroom / Gregory Laski -- Persons in the balance : the scale of justice in Chesnutt's The marrow of tradition / Trinyan Paulsen Mariano -- Teaching "The sheriff's children," "The wife of his youth," and The marrow of tradition in the United States-Mexico borderlands / Brian Yothers -- Teaching whiteness, folklore, and the discourses of race in The colonel's dream / Shirley Moody-Turner -- American sentimentalism and The colonel's dream / Katherine Adams -- Economics, race, and social (in)justice : teaching The colonel's dream / Francesca Sawaya. |
| Abstract |
"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"-- Provided by publisher. |
