Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race

Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) was the first African American writer of fiction to win the attention and approval of Americas literary establishment. Looking anew at Chesnutts public and private writings, his fiction and nonfiction, and his well-known and recently rediscovered works, Dean McWilliams explores Chesnutts distinctive contribution to American culture: how his stories and novels challenge our dominant cultural narrativesparticularly their underlying assumptions about race.The published canon of Chesnutts work has doubled in the last decade: three novels completed but unpublished in Chesnutts life have appeared, as have scholarly editions of Chesnutts journals, his letters, and his essays. This book is the first to offer chapter-length analyses of each of Chesnutts six novels. It also devotes three chapters to his short fiction. Previous critics have read Chesnutts nonfiction as biographical background for his fiction. McWilliams is the first to analyze these nonfiction texts as complex verbal artifacts embodying many of the same tensions and ambiguities found in Chesnutts stories and novels. The book includes separate chapters on Chesnutts journal and on his important essay The Future American. Moreover, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race approaches Chesnutts writings from the perspective of recent literary theory. To a greater extent than any previous study of Chesnutt, it explores the way his texts interrogate and deconstruct the language and the intellectual constructs we use to organize reality.The full effect of this new study is to show us how much more of a twentieth-century writer Chesnutt is than has been previously acknowledged. This accomplishment can only hasten his reemergence as one of our most important observers of race in American culture.