Literature and Visual Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

In the early twentieth century, an increasingly diverse group of Russians and Americans reflected upon their changing worlds in literature and visual culture. They produced competing representations of serfs, enslaved African Americans, peasants, and freedpeople that alternately idealized and criticized the pre and post-emancipation eras. This chapter studies the work of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, Kate Chopin, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Thomas Dixon, Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Anton Chekhov, and Evgenii Opochinin.

Popular Historical Fiction

During the post-emancipation era in Russia and the United States, authors created nostalgic historical fiction that romanticized Russian serfdom and American slavery. This chapter compares the short stories of white, Southern authors Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris with the mass-oriented historical fiction of Russian aristocrats Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov’ev, Evgenii Salias, and Evgenii Opochinin. In their literature, these privileged authors created narratives targeting middle-class readers that deliberately misrepresented the histories of slavery and serfdom during a period characterized by the acquisition of critical new rights by peasants and African Americans.

An intercultural reading of Charles w. Chesnutt’s the goophered grapevine and of Thomas page’s Marse Chan: racial representation in postbellum southern short stories

Este artigo propõe analisar dois contos sobre o Sul dos Estados Unidos pré-guerra civil. O primeiro conto é Marse Chan de Thomas Nelson Page e o outro é The Goophered Grapevine de Charles W. Chesnutt. Para enriquecer a discussão, nós primeiro revisamos a literatura escrita por negros americanos sobre a escravidão durante o período anterior à guerra civil, em particular os trabalhos de Harriet Ann Jacobs e Frederick Douglass, e prosseguimos a articular que o escritor afro-americano Chesnutt é mais capaz de descrever uma narrativa complexa sobre a escravidão no Sul dos Estados Unidos do que o Page. A relevância da nossa análise se baseia em uma postura intercultural que entende não apenas a importância de ler-se literatura interculturalmente, mas que também reconhece que entender outras culturas e literaturas nos ajuda a melhor compreender nós mesmos e as culturas dentro das quais estamos inseridos.

Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature

Defined by both cultural vibrancy and widespread poverty, and marked by a long and complex history of trade, migration, cultural exchange, and slavery, the literature of the U.S. South is born of the intricacies of a complex, polymorphous history and culture. The 19th century was a particularly tumultuous period, as the region experienced the rise and fall of chattel slavery through a military loss in 1865 that left in its wake a devastated country, a decimated generation, widespread poverty and physical destruction, the ruin of an agricultural economy that once offered the promise of cotton as “king,” and a legacy of explosive racial rage that would continue throughout the 20th century. Against these social, political, and economic changes, the dominant literatures that emerged reflected stratified life across color lines: a white pastoral tradition that celebrated the plantation and mourned for a past that never was, and a literature of slavery and resistance that envisioned a different future for African Americans. Cloaking in romance their fervent beliefs in class hierarchy and enlightened upper-class rule, Confederate poets such as Paul Hamilton Hayne, Henry Timrod, and William Gilmore Simms positioned white mastery as the natural outcome of chivalry, while Joel Chandler Harris, John Pendleton Kennedy, and Thomas Nelson Page spun nostalgic fantasies of antebellum plantation life that reinforced myths about the continuing docility and inexpensiveness of the South’s black workforce. As blacks began to protest new forms of subjugation—the “Jim Crow” legislation that prohibited racial intermingling in public spaces, the recourse to lynching to terrorize African Americans—plantation fiction increasingly came to form an imagined defense against the new racial realities that would unfold over the course of the 20th century. Meanwhile, black voices during the period offered a powerful alternative to white command, repudiating seductive myths of plantation life. The slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Booker T. Washington revealed a system infested with greed, inhumanity, deception, and cruelty. Slave writers George Moses Horton, Hannah Crafts, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and post–Civil War poets Albery A. Whitman and Joseph S. Cotter, Sr. wrote skillfully about racial and nonracial topics in ways that powerfully demonstrated black agency and subjectivity against a white rule that sought to strip them of it, while the work of Charles Chesnutt, William Wells Brown, and other writers drew on black vernacular language and folklore. Entangled by a color line that would soon be singled out by W. E. B. Du Bois as a resistant and virulent problem for the nation at large, white and black Southerners, as the literature of the nineteenth century American South testifies, alternately struggled to evade and express the demands of racism’s intimate psychological consequences and the polyvalent power of interconnected ideologies of class and gender formed in this era.

Cavaliers and Crackers, Tara and Tobacco Road: The Myth of a Two-Class White South

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

Charles W. Chesnutt'sThe Colonel's Dream:The Failure of Critical Realism

C. Vann Woodward, in hisOrigins of the New South, suggestively links the economic revival in the South in the late 19th century with a literary revival, a revival that he judges as distinctly inferior to its economic counterpart: “For all the shortcomings and the comparative brevity of the revival … the Southern writers undeniably possessed solid virtues. Among them, however, one will search in vain for a realistic portrayal of their own times … the writers were too preoccupied with the quaint ‘types’ of the hinterland to notice what was going on in their own parlors” (164). Preoccupied with a nostalgic vision of region, Southern writers failed, it is generally agreed, to represent significant social changes in realistic terms. More recently, Jules Chametzky has echoed Vann Wood-ward's observation when he wrote that “local color and regionalism … became … toward the end of the nineteenth century, a strategy, largely, for ignoring or minimizing social issues of great significance” (21). Of course, not all local colorists ignored or minimized these issues – only those who I've taken to calling “weak local colorists.” Writers like Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris looked back, nostalgically, to a romanticized past; in flight from their present, they used the plantation past as a way of attempting to justify the status quo in the South at the turn of the centnry.