Title:
- Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, The
Authors:
Genres:
Reviews:
| Review | Author |
|---|---|
| Charles W Chesnutt - Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, The - 7 | StefanY |
Editions:
| # | Date | Publisher | Binding | Cover |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1899-00-00 | Houghton Mifflin |  |
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- Blurb:
- [From the Back Cover]
The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success. Since their initial publication in 1899 they have come to be seen as some of the most remarkable works of African American literature from the Emancipation through the Harlem Renaissance. Less well known, though, is that the The Conjure Woman, as first published by Houghton Mifflin, was not wholly Chesnutt's creation but a work shaped and selected by his editors. This edition reassembles for the first time all of Chesnutt's work in the conjure tale genre, the entire imaginative feat of which the published Conjure Woman forms only a part. It allows the reader to see how the published volume was created, how an African American author negotiated with the tastes of the dominant literary culture of the late nineteenth century, and how that culture both promoted and delimited his work.
In the tradition of Uncle Remus, the conjure tale listens in on a poor black southerner, who recounts in a strong dialect a local incident to a transplanted northerner for the northerner's enlightenment and edification. But in Chesnutt's hands the tradition is transformed. No longer a reactionary flight of nostalgia for the antebellum South, the stories in this book celebrate and at the same time question the folk culture they so pungently portray, ultimately conveying the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Humorous, heartbreaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for over a century.