Playing the races
Subtitle: ethnic caricature and American literary realism
By: Henry B. Wonham.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 196
Subjects: American fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism.; Race in literature.; Caricatures and cartoons -- United States -- History -- 19th century.; Stereotype (Psychology) in literature.; Ethnicity in literature.; Realism in literature.; United States -- Ethnic relations -- History -- 19th century.; United States -- Race relations -- History -- 19th century.
Description: "Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? As a self-described "tool of the democratic spirit," designed to "prick the bubble of abstract types," literary realism would seem to have little in common with the aggressively dehumanizing comic imagery that began to proliferate in magazines and newspapers after the Civil War." "Yet if literary realism pursued the interests of democracy by affirming "the equality of things and the unity of men," why did its major practitioners regularly employ comic typification as a feature of their representational practice? Critics have often dismissed such apparent lapses in realist practice as blind spots, vestiges of a genteel social consciousness that failed to keep pace with realism's avowed democratic aspirations. Such explanations are useful to a point, but they overlook the fact that the age of realism in American art and letters was simultaneously the great age of ethnic caricature. Henry B. Wonham argues that these two aesthetic programs, one committed to representation of the fully humanized individual, the other invested in broad ethnic abstractions, operate less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which receive full play within the period's most demanding literary and graphic works. The seemingly anomalous presence of gross ethnic abstractions within works by Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Charles Chesnutt hints at realism's vexed and complicated relationship with the caricatured ethnic images that played a central role in late nineteenth-century American thinking about race, identity, and national culture."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-192) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: the age of caricature, the age of realism; title: William Dean Howells and the touch of exaggeration which typifies; title: "I want a real coon": Twain and ethnic caricature; title: A Jamesian art to be cultivated; title: Edith Wharton's flamboyant copy; title: The "curious realism" of Charles Chesnutt.