James Weldon Johnson and the Genteel Tradition

Müller, Timo

doi:10.1353/arq.2013.0012

arq

2013

DOI: 10.1353/arq.2013.0012

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James Weldon Johnson and the Genteel Tradition

Timo Müller¹

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2021

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Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Sedlmeier

2021

Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik

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Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt through the lens of the convertibility of literary capital, developed with Pierre Bourdieu. From within the racial taxonomy and with white middle-class readers as implied addressees, Howells conceives of both writers as participating in a literary market, a field structured by the tenets of realism. Howells endows Dunbar with universal literary capital and creates a regional affiliation that breaches the color line, before he singles out his poems written in vernacular notation as lasting contributions and asserts the valence of such notation as general poetic practice. On Chesnutt he bestows literary capital by marking and converting two innovations: the genre of the short story and the representation of a world in-between the racial divide. In turn, the convertibility of that world is secured by a comparison of social class habits.

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Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Sedlmeier

2021

Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik

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James Weldon Johnson and the Genteel Tradition

Cited by 1 publication

References 17 publications

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

Greatness and the Convertibility of Literary Capital: W. D. Howells and Black Writers

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