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- Title
AFRICAN AMERICAN VERNACULAR LATIN AND OVIDIAN FIGURES IN CHARLES CHESNUTT'S CONJURE STORIES.
- Authors
Koy, Christopher E.
- Abstract
Scholars have assumed that Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) employed a technique of interviewing African Americans for their folktales in order to compose his collection of stories entitled The Conjure Woman (1899). However, no thoroughgoing attempt to locate the sources for these conjure stories by Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932) has been undertaken. Scholars have simply positioned African American folklore as the source without actually citing any of the hundreds of tales collected by folklorists for comparative study because Chesnutt's authentic use of African American Vernacular English and the voodoo give a folklore 'feel' to his stories. While folklore has been thoroughly documented as the source for the famous Tales of Uncle Remus (1880) by Joel Chandler Harris -- even Harris's African American informants have been identified -- no similar verification appears in studies by Chesnutt scholars who have presumed that the folktale was Chesnutt's source. No similarities among the African American tales collected by folklorists were discovered. The conclusion drawn in this study is that, in composing his conjure stories, Chesnutt combined his extensive knowledge of classical literature with whole cloth to produce The Conjure Woman, excepting the first conjure story, "The Goophered Grapevine" (1887), the metamorphosis section of which Chesnutt had heard from his father-in-law's gardener in Fayetteville, North Carolina. As for many of the remaining stories, rather than African American folklore, Chesnutt made use of Ovidian figures from The Metamorphoses.
- Subjects
CHESNUTT, Charles W. (Charles Waddell), 1858-1932; CONJURE Woman, The (Book); COMPARATIVE literature; AMERICAN literature; CLASSICAL literature; GATES, Henry Louis, 1950-; BLACK English; METAMORPHOSES (Book : Ovid); LATIN literature
- Publication
Litteraria Pragensia: Studies in Literature & Culture, 2011, Vol 21, Issue 41, p50
- ISSN
0862-8424
- Publication type
Literary Criticism