Playing the Races : Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism.

Intro -- CONTENTS -- INTRODUCTION: The Age of Caricature, the Age of Realism -- 1 William Dean Howells and the Touch of Exaggeration That Typifies -- 2 "I Want a Real Coon": Twain and Ethnic Caricature -- 3 A Jamesian Art to Be Cultivated -- 4 Edith Wharton's Flamboyant Copy -- 5 The "Curious Realism" of Charles W. Chesnutt -- NOTES -- INDEX -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- V -- W -- Z.

Why did so many of the writers who aligned themselves with the social and aesthetic aims of late nineteenth-century American literary realism rely on stock conventions of ethnic caricature in their treatment of immigrant and African-American figures? Playing the Races argues that literary realism and ethnic caricature, two dramatically different aesthetic programs that flourished side by side in periodicals of the era, operated less as antithetical choices than as complementary impulses, both of which received full play within late nineteenth-century America's most demanding literary and graphic works.

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Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2024. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.