A Ohio University Press Book
“Charles Duncan’s compelling and perceptive analysis of Chesnutt’s narrative genius will go a long way in resurrecting the reputation of a pioneering African-American writer whose work deserves more attention appreciate than it has received over the years.”
Robert C. Leitz, III, Literary Realism
“In this detailed and intelligent book, Charles Duncan maps out the ways in which Chesnutt expertly narrates his works to embrace a form of multiculturalism that explores the formation of identity and the preservation of genealogy and family structure…Duncan demonstrates impressive detail in his research.”
Kaylen Tucker, Modern Fiction Studies
As the first African-American fiction writer to achieve a national reputation, Ohio native Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) in many ways established the terms of the black literary tradition now exemplified by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Charles Johnson.
Following the highly autobiographical nonfiction produced by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and other slave narrative writers, Chesnutt’s complex, multi-layered short fiction transformed the relationship between African-American writers and their readers. But despite generous praise from W. D. Howells and other important critics of his day, and from such prominent readers as William L. Andrews, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Eric Sundquist in ours, Chesnutt occupies a curiously ambiguous place in American literary history.
In The Absent Man, Charles Duncan demonstrates that Chesnutt’s uneasy position in the American literary tradition can be traced to his remarkable narrative subtlety. Profoundly aware of the delicacy of his situation as a black intellectual at the turn of the century, Chesnutt infused his work with an intricate, enigmatic artistic vision that defies monolithic or unambiguously political interpretation, especially with regard to issues of race and identity that preoccupied him throughout his career.
In this first book-length study of the innovative short fiction, Duncan devotes particular attention to elucidating these sophisticated narrative strategies as the grounding for Chesnutt’s inauguration of a tradition of African-American fiction.
An associate professor of English at Peace College, Raleigh, North Carolina, Charles Duncan is the author of The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt and numerous articles on American literature. He received the Charles Waddell Chesnutt Association’s Sylvia Lyons Render Award for his work in Chesnutt studies. More info →
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Hardcover
978-0-8214-1239-8
Retail price: $39.95,
S.
Release date: October 2005
234 pages
·
5½ × 8½ in.
Rights: World
Electronic
978-0-8214-4043-8
Release date: October 2005
234 pages
Rights: World
In His Own Voice
The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Edited by Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau
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Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
More than seventy-five works in six genres. Featured are the previously unpublished play Herrick and two one-act plays, largely ignored for a century, that demonstrate Dunbar’s subversion of the minstrel tradition.
African American Authors · African American Studies · Ohio and Regional
The Complete Stories of Paul Laurence Dunbar
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Edited by Thomas Lewis Morgan and Gene Andrew Jarrett
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Foreword by Shelley Fisher Fishkin
The son of former slaves, Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the most prominent figures in American literature at the turn of the twentieth century. Thirty-three years old at the time of his death in 1906, he had published four novels, four collections of short stories, and fourteen books of poetry, as well as numerous songs, plays, and essays in newspapers and magazines around the world.In
The Collected Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar
By Paul Laurence Dunbar
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Edited by Herbert Woodward Martin, Ronald Primeau, and Gene Andrew Jarrett
Presents four Dunbar novels under one cover for the first time, allowing readers to assess why he was such a seminal influence on the twentieth century African American writers who followed him into the American canon.
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