The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales

Charles W. Chesnutt

Published by Duke University Press 1993

The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales

Charles W. Chesnutt
Edited by: Richard H. Brodhead

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822377795

Overview
Contents

About this book

The stories in The Conjure Woman were Charles W. Chesnutt's first great literary success, and 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. Lesser 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 a part. It allows the reader to see how the original 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, speaking strong dialect, as he recounts 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, and ultimately convey the pleasures and anxieties of a world in transition. Written in the late nineteenth century, a time of enormous growth and change for a country only recently reunited in peace, these stories act as the uneasy meeting ground for the culture of northern capitalism, professionalism, and Christianity and the underdeveloped southern economy, a kind of colonial Third World whose power is manifest in life charms, magic spells, and ha'nts, all embodied by the ruling figure of the conjure woman.
Humorous, heart-breaking, lyrical, and wise, these stories make clear why the fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt has continued to captivate audiences for a century.

Author / Editor information

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858- 1932) is the author of The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories (1899), The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and Colonel's Dream (1905).

Richard H. Brodhead, Professor of English at Yale University, is the author of numerous books about nineteenth-century American Literature, including Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America.

Reviews

"Finally, we have Charles W. Chesnutt's conjure woman stories as he wrote them, not as Houghton Mifflin edited them. This collection is a landmark in American literary publishing for it helps us to understand the pressures exerted upon all authors and especially on African American writers. More important, these wonderful stories are now available to a new generation of readers."—Cathy N. Davidson

"The publication of the conjure tales of Chesnutt constituted a crucial development in the history of African American [literature]. Yet up to now no one has attempted to do what Brodhead has done--namely, collect all the stories in this vein and publish them with an introduction that explains their import individually, serially, and as a collection. . . . His introduction augments the best scholarship that's been done on Chesnutt with his own broad expertise in the history of American fiction and his acute readings of individual Chesnutt tales."—William L. Andrews, University of Kansas

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chronology of Composition Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
A Note on the Text Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
Selected Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
THE CONJURE WOMAN
The Goophered Grapevine Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
Po' Sandy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
Mars Jeems's Nightmare Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
The Conjurer's Revenge Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	70
Sis' Becky's Pickaninny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	82
The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
Hot-Foot Hannibal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
RELA TED TALES
Dave's Neckliss Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
A Deep Sleeper Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	136
Lonesome Ben Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
The Dumb Witness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	158
A Victim of Heredity; or, Why the Darkey Loves Chicken Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	172
Tobe's Tribulations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	183
The Marked Tree Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	194

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Pages
- Main content: 216

eBook

Published: October 19, 1993
ISBN: 9780822377795