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Collected in this volume are the 1889--1905 letters of one of the first African-American literary artists to cross the "color line" into the de facto segregated American publishing industry of the turn of the century. Selected for inclusion are those chronicling the rise of Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), an attorney and businessman in Cleveland, Ohio, who achieved prominence as a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and lecturer despite the obstacles faced by a man of color during the "Jim Crow" period. In his insightful commentaries on his own situation, Chesnutt provides as well a special perspective on life-at-large in America during the Gilded Age, the "gay `90s" (which were not so gay for African Americans), and the Progressive era. Like his black correspondents--Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, T. Thomas Fortune, and William M. Trotter--he was one of the major commentators on what was then termed the "Negro Problem." His most distinguished novels, The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), were published by major "white" presses of the time; not only did his editors and publishers but then-preeminent black and white critics greet these literary protests against racism as proof of the intellectual and artistic excellence of which a long-oppressed people were capable when afforded equal opportunity.Since the 1960s, when the rediscovery of his genius began in earnest, Chesnutt has received even more recognition than he enjoyed by the early 1900s. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III, have surveyed every collection of Chesnutt's papers and those of his correspondents in order to reconstruct the story of his most vital years as an author. Their introduction contextualizes the letters in light of Chesnutt biography and the less-than-promising prospects faced by a would-be literary artist of his racial background. Their encyclopedic annotations explaining contemporary events to which Chesnutt responds and what was then transpiring in both black and white cultural environments illuminate not only Chesnutt's character but those of many now unfamiliar figures who also contributed to what Chesnutt termed the "cause." Provided in this first-ever edition of Chesnutt's letters is a detailed portrait of one of the pioneers in the African-American literary tradition and a panorama of American life a century ago.Originally published in 1997.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

African Americans --- African American novelists --- Novelists, American --- Afro-American novelists --- Novelists, African American --- Social conditions. --- Chesnutt, Charles W.

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African American novelists --- Novelists, American --- American novelists --- Afro-American novelists --- Novelists, African American --- Chesnutt, Charles W. --- English --- Languages & Literatures --- American Literature

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Looking anew at Chesnutt's public and private writings and his well-known and recently rediscovered works, McWilliams explores Chesnutt's distinctive contribution to American culture: how his stories and novels challenge our dominant cultural narratives--particularly their underlying assumptions about race.

Race in literature. --- Group identity in literature. --- African Americans in literature. --- Identity (Psychology) in literature. --- African Americans --- Afro-Americans in literature --- Negroes in literature --- Negritude --- Race identity. --- Ethnic identity --- Chesnutt, Charles W. --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Views on race.

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" During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view--scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary--they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities--a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today. Universes without Us explores a lesser-known countertradition in American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither "other" nor "mirror." Instead, humans are enmeshed with "alien" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of "us." By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it. Universes without Us demonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman. "--

American literature --- Cosmology in literature --- Human beings in literature --- Humanity in literature --- Order (Philosophy) in literature --- Self in literature --- History and criticism --- Adams, Henry, --- Chesnutt, Charles W. --- Hurston, Zora Neale --- Poe, Edgar Allan, --- Criticism and interpretation.

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Aesthetics, American --- African Americans in literature --- American literature --- Blues (Music) in literature --- Lovingood, Sut (Fictitious character) --- Melancholy in literature --- Music and literature --- National characteristics, American, in literature --- Sadness in literature --- Afro-Americans in literature --- Negroes in literature --- American aesthetics --- Literature and music --- Literature --- Sut Lovingood (Fictitious character) --- History and criticism --- Chesnutt, Charles W. --- Harris, George Washington, --- Hurston, Zora Neale --- Nordan, Lewis --- Criticism and interpretation. --- Southern States --- In literature. --- Intellectual life. --- Music --- Thematology --- anno 1800-1999 --- USA: South