Academic literature on the topic 'Chesnutt Howells'

William Dean Howells was sympathetic to African Americans. This is apparent not only in his fiction but in essays focusing on Paul Laurence Dunbar, Booker T. Washington, and Charles W. Chesnutt. All three typed the "sweetness" that Howells was delighted to find among representative members of a still-oppressed race. The Howells-Chesnutt relationship was a cordial one in which the former publicly expressed his a appreciation of the latter's literary talent and thus assisted him in achieving his rise to celebrity; Howells's needs, too, were met, since Chesnutt displayed a freedom from "bitterness" that bode well for black-white relations in the future. The relationship ended abruptly when, with the publication of The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Chesnutt disclosed a vindictive side of his personality that Howells had not seen. Reviewing Marrow as a "bitter, bitter" book, a disillusioned Howells also wrote to Henry B. Fuller: "Good Lord! How such a negro must hate us."

Abstract Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

This book examines the cultural pursuit of a painless ideal as a neglected context for US literary realism. Advances in anesthesia in the final decades of the nineteenth century together with influential religious ideologies helped strengthen the equation of a comfortable existence insulated from physical suffering with the height of civilization. Theories of the civilizing process as intensifying sensitivity to suffering were often adduced to justify a revulsion from physical pain among the postbellum elite. Yet a sizeable portion of this elite rejected this comfort-seeking, pain-avoiding aesthetic as a regrettable consequence of over-civilization. Proponents of the strenuous cult instead identified pain and strife as essential ingredients of an invigorated life. The Ache of the Actual examines variants on a lesser known counter-sensibility integral to the writings of a number of influential literary realists. William Dean Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, and Charles Chesnutt each delineated alternative definitions of a superior sensibility indebted to suffering rather than to either revulsion from or immersion in it. They resolved the binary contrast between pain-aversion on one side and pain-immersion on the other by endorsing an uncommon responsiveness to pain whose precise form depended on the ethical and aesthetic priorities of the writer in question. Focusing on these variations elucidates the similarities and differences within US literary realism while revealing areas of convergence and divergence between realism and other long-nineteenth-century literary modes, chief among them both sentimentalism and naturalism, that were similarly preoccupied with pain.