The Marrow of Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

The Marrow of Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Charles W. Chesnutt, Werner Sollors
ISBN-10:
0393934144
ISBN-13:
9780393934144
Pub. Date:
05/23/2012
Publisher:
Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
ISBN-10:
0393934144
ISBN-13:
9780393934144
Pub. Date:
05/23/2012
Publisher:
Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
The Marrow of Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

The Marrow of Tradition: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 1

by Charles W. Chesnutt, Werner Sollors
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Overview

The Norton Critical Edition of this hugely influential novel gives readers the fullest possible sense of its historical background and critical assessment.

Inspired by the 1898 Wilmington Riot and the eyewitness accounts of Charles W. Chesnutt’s own family, Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition captures the astonishing moment in American history when a violent coup d’état resulted in the subversion of a free and democratic election.

The Norton Critical Edition text is based on the 1901 first edition. It is accompanied by a note on the text, Werner Sollors’s insightful introduction, explanatory annotations, and twenty-four photographs and illustrations.

“Contexts” connects the novel to the historical events in Wilmington and includes a wealth of newspaper articles, editorials, and biographical sketches of the central players.

The account of riot instigator Alfred Moore Waddell, published just weeks after the event, is reprinted, along with three rarely seen letters: W. E. B. Du Bois’s and Booker T. Washington’s comments on the novel and Walter Hines Page’s letter to Chesnutt. Rounding out the historical record is a selection of 1890s sheet music, a poem, and newspaper articles on the Cakewalk, a popular dance of the period with roots in slavery.

“Criticism” begins with twelve contemporary reviews, including those by Hamilton Wright Mabie, Katherine Glover, William Dean Howells, and Sterling A. Brown. Fifteen recent assessments focus on the novel’s characters, history, realism, and violence. As scholarship on The Marrow of Tradition and on Wilmington in 1898 has been especially active since the 1990s, ten assessments are from this period.

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393934144
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 05/23/2012
Series: Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 576
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)
Age Range: 15 Years

About the Author

Charles W. Chesnutt was born in 1858 in Cleveland, Ohio. At the end of the Civil War, his parents returned to their native Fayetteville, North Carolina, where Charles attended a school run by the Freedmen’s Bureau. After serving as principal of the State Colored Normal School from 1880 to 1883, he abandoned both his teaching career and a South that was increasingly hostile to African Americans. Moving back to Cleveland, he practiced law, established a successful legal stenography firm, and began pursuing a career as a writer. His first story, “Uncle Peter’s House,” about a newly emancipated Black family whose home is burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, appeared in 1885. It introduced the themes of folk life, racial injustice, and social reform that he would explore in dozens of short stories, essays, and three novels. By the time he died in 1932, Chesnutt was widely recognized as the dean of African American fiction writers.

Werner Sollors is Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and African American Studies at Harvard University. He previously taught at Columbia University, the Free University of Berlin, and the Universita degli Studi di Venezia. He is the author of Ethnic Modernism, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, and Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones: The Quest for a “Populist Modernism.” His edited works include A New Literary History of America (with Greil Marcus), African American Literary Studies: New Texts, New Approaches, New Challenges (with Glenda R. Carpio), The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations (with Marc Shell), Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of America, The Return of Thematic Criticism, Theories of Ethnicity: A Classical Reader, The Invention of Ethnicity, and the Norton Critical edition of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself.

Table of Contents

About the Series
About This Volume
Illustrations

PART ONE

The Marrow of Tradition: The Complete Text
Introduction: Cultural and Historical Background
Chronology of Chesnutt's Life and Times
A Note on the Text
The Marrow of Tradition [1901 Houghton Mifflin edition]


PART TWO
The Marrow of Tradition: Cultural Contexts


1. Caste, Race and Gender After Reconstruction
Philip Bruce, from The Platinum Negro as a Freeman
Tom Watson, from "The Negro Question in the South"
William Dean Howells, from An Imperative Duty
Booker T. Washington, "Atlanta Exposition Speech" from Up from Slavery
Charles W. Chesnutt, from "The Future American"
W.E.B. DuBois, from "The Conservation of Race"
Theodore Roosevelt, from "Birth Reform, from the Positive, not the Negative Side"
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, from Women and Economics
Fannie Barrier Williams, from "The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Woman"
Roscoe Conklin Bruce, from "Service by the Educated Negro"

2. Law and Lawlessness
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution
George Washington Cable, from "The Freedman's Case in Equity"
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): excerpts from brief by Albion Tourgee, majority opinion by Justice Henry Billings Brown, and the dissenting opinion by Justice John Marshall Harlan
"Suffrage and Eligibility to Office," Article VI, amendment to the North Carolina State Constitution
Ida B. Wells, from Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases
"Lynched Negro and Wife First Mutilated," Vicksburg (Mississippi) Evening Post February 8, 1904
"Victim's Family Begs to See Negro Burned," Atlanta Constitution October 2, 1905
"Belleville is Complacent Over Horrible Lynching,: New York Herald June 9, 1903
Jane Addams, from "Respect for Law," Independent
Ray Stannard Baker, from "A Race Riot and After," Following the Color Line
George H. White, from a speech before the United States House of Representatives, February 23, 1900

3. The Wilmington Riot
Alexander Manly, editorial printed in Literary Digest, 1898
Rebecca Latimer Fulton, speech reported in The Wilmington Star
From the "White Man's Declaration of Independence" (or, Wilmington Declaration of Independence), from Appleton's Cyclopaedia
Anonymous letter to William McKinley, 13 November 1898
Charles Chesnutt, from letter to Walter Hines Page, 1898
Jane Cronly, "An Account of the Race Riot in Wilmington, N.C."

4. Segregation as Culture: Etiquette, Spectacle, and Fiction
Wilmington Messenger article, rpt in Raleigh New and Observer, 8 September 1899
Photograph of "Old Plantation" Midway booth at the 1896 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia
From The Cotton States and International Exposition program
Tom Fletcher, from 100 Years of the Negro in Show Business
"Old" and "New" Negro photographs juxtaposed, from Frances Benjamin Johnston's The Hampton album.
Charles Chesnutt, Literary Memoranda
Charles Chesnutt, "Po' Sandy"
Thomas Dixon, from The Leopard's Spots
Williams Dean Howells, from "A Psychological Counter-Current in Recent Fiction" North American Review

Bibliography

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Chesnutt was tremendously explicit in representing the violence and his own anger. Today it reads as one of the more enduring novels of the era." —Richard Yarborough, UCLA

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