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Initial Article Evaluation - The Conjure Woman
[edit]Evaluation of The Conjure Woman
[edit]- More specifics about the seven stories within the collection could be added, minimally story titles.
- Much of the article's phrasing is somewhat awkward. The sentence "The stories' basis in folk traditions earned publication of the collection." is phrased badly.
- Could provide more context for this short story collection vs. other works; mentions a character idealizes the south but not that Chestnutt is resisting that viewpoint intentionally.
- The article does not talk about reception of the collection, which I think is important.
- The article is neutral in tone.
- There are only a few sources, more sources can/should be added.
- The links work, and they are paraphrased as not to plagiarize.
- It is part of the project Wiki Novels. It is a stub-class article according to that project and doesn't have an importance rating.
 | This is a user sandbox of SBLinton. You can use it for testing or practicing edits. This is not the sandbox where you should draft your assigned article for a dashboard.wikiedu.org course. To find the right sandbox for your assignment, visit your Dashboard course page and follow the Sandbox Draft link for your assigned article in the My Articles section. |
Article Assignment
[edit]Questions for Reviewer:
- Is the explanation of why The Conjure Woman is different from other conjure/folk tales clear?
- Would it be helpful to have an example/summary of one story? A summary of "The Gophered Grapevine" can be pieced together via scholarly articles, but not sure if it is excessive.
- Are there any instances of awkward word choice or ambiguous phrasing?
The Conjure Woman
[edit]The Conjure Woman is an 1899 collection of short stories by American writer Charles W. Chesnutt. It is Chesnutt's first book, and an important work of post-Civil War African American literature.[1]
Background
[edit]Charles Chesnutt wrote the first of the conjure tales, “The Gophered Grapevine,” in 1887. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly. That same year, Chesnutt traveled to Boston and met with Walter Hines Page and other employees of Houghton, Mifflin, and Company publishing house.[2] Page asked Chesnutt to forward some of his writing. This was the beginning of a multiple-year correspondence between Page and Chesnutt.
Chesnutt wrote three more conjure tales between 1887 and 1889, two of which would eventually appear in The Conjure Woman.[2] "Po’ Sandy" was originally printed in The Atlantic Monthly in 1888, and "The Conjurer's Revenge" was published in Overland Monthly in June 1889.[3] In March of 1898, Page wrote Chesnutt informing him that Houghton Mifflin would consider publishing a short story collection of conjure stories with "the same original quality" as "The Goophered Grapevine" and "Po' Sandy."[2][4][5] Over the next two months, Chesnutt wrote six additional conjure stories, which he sent to Page. Four of these stories—"Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," and "Hot-Foot Hannibal," were selected for inclusion in the collection.[2][3] "Hot-Foot Hannibal" also appeared in the January 1899 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. In March 1899, The Conjure Woman was published.[2]
List of Stories
[edit]- "The Goophered Grapevine"
- "Po' Sandy"
- "Mars Jeems's Nightmare"
- "The Conjurer's Revenge"
- "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny"
- "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt"
- "Hot-Foot Hannibal"
Content
[edit]Every story contains the same frame narrative structure and main characters in which Uncle Julius McAdoo, a former slave, shares a conjure tale with a white northern couple.[2] The couple, John and Annie, meet Uncle Julius when they are considering moving south for Annie’s health and visit in search of property. John is captivated by the pre-Civil War South and wants to own a vineyard. Each story opens with a monologue from John's point of view, which establishes the setting and John's idealistic perspective.[6] The bulk of each story is Uncle Julius's retelling of a conjure tale. Uncle Julius is a former slave and trickster figure whose accounts clash with John's ideas.[7][8] The tales involve other former slaves, some from the McAdoo plantation with Julius and some from nearby plantations, and derived from African American folktales and hoodoo conjuring traditions.[2] Each story contains a conjurer, most notably Aun' Peggy in "Po' Sandy," "Mars Jeems's Nightmare," "Sis' Becky's Pickaninny," and "Hot Foot Hannibal." In "The Conjurer's Revenge" and "The Gray Wolf's Ha'nt," he discusses the activities of free black conjure men.[6] After Uncle Julius concludes, Annie comments on the veracity or contents of the tale.[2]
The Conjure Woman differs from other post-Civil War conjure tales and plantation writing in its condemnation of the plantation regime.[5] Typical plantation literature relied on racial stereotypes, portraying an Edenic relationship where magnanimous white slaveholders provide for infantile blacks.[5][1] Although Chesnutt follows the same general structure, with a friendly former slave recounting a story to white northerners, the stories Uncle Julius tells are not wistful.[2] They revised the classical plantation narrative and contradicted the dominant racial discourse of the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, depicting black resistance and survival within white culture.[2][6][8] Despite their enslavement, Uncle Julius and other slaves leverage power in exchanges of information, favors, or conjuring, and demonstrate their intelligence and person-hood through plots of self-gain and sometimes revenge.[6]
Reception
[edit]The Conjure Woman was reviewed over seventy times and received mostly positive reviews.[9] It sold so well that Houghton Mifflin released two more books by Chesnutt the following year.[3]
In 1926, the book was adapted into a silent film titled The Conjure Woman by Oscar Micheaux.
External links
[edit]- Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman, online free text at Project Gutenberg
- Conjure Woman Reviews, collection of reviews from 1899, Charles W. Chesnutt Archive
The Conjure Woman public domain audiobook at LibriVox
References
[edit]- ^ a b Mackethan, Lucinda H. (1985). "Plantation fiction, 1865-1900". In Rubin, Louis D. (ed.). The History of Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 9780807112519.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j Chesnutt, Charles W. (2012). Stepto, Robert B.; Greeson, Jennifer Rae (eds.). The Conjure Stories. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-92780-1.
- ^ a b c Chesnutt, Charles W. (1993). Brodhead, Richard H. (ed.). The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales. Durham & London: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0822313786.
- ^ "Note on the Texts". The Library of America online. Literary Classics of the United States. 2001. Retrieved 3 April 2011.
- ^ a b c Martin, Gretchen (Winter 2009). "Overfamiliarization as Subversive Plantation Critique in Charles W. Chesnutt's The ConjureWoman & other Conjure Tales". South Atlantic Review. 74 (1): 65–86. JSTOR 27784831 – via JSTOR.
- ^ a b c d Kirkpatrick, Mary Alice (2004). "Summary of The Conjure Woman". Documenting the American South. UNC Chapel Hill University Library. Retrieved 2 December 2018.
- ^ Cash, Wiley (December 2005). ""Those Folks Downstairs Believe in Ghosts": The Eradication of Folklore in the Literature Of Charles W. Chesnutt". CLA Journal. 49 (2): 184–204. JSTOR 44325310 – via JSTOR.
- ^ a b Shaffer, Donald M. (2012). "African American Folklore as Racial Project in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman". The Western Journal of Black Studies. 36 (4): 325–336. OCLC 5605178458 – via WorldCat.
- ^ Browner, Stephanie. "Charles W. Chesnutt". chesnuttarchive.org. Retrieved 2 December 2018.
Article Evaluation/Peer Review of "Are Women People?"
[edit]Article currently appears on: User:Iperone1/sandbox
Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?
Everything in the article is relevant to the article topic. However, the complete contents of the book are listed and that makes the article a bit unwieldy. I personally found the discussion of each of the five sections to be adequate. An external link to a listing of the complete contents might render the article more readable. Additionally, the formatting and citations are inconsistent and partly missing (as of this review at 12/11/18, 5:28 PM), which distracts from the content. Some of the content is also redundant or could be rephrased to be more concise. For example, the introduction up at the top of the article before the contents breakdown twice expresses the basic sentiment "the book promoted suffrage ideas." Certain content summations are also unclear, such as the sentence, "Her poems in this section varied from satirical and comical to biting and harsh critiques of the quotes to which she was responding." Satire can be comical, so a more specific differentiation between the satire and the comic here would be helpful. A specific citation for the observations about satire/comic might also be valuable. The line "One such work that exemplifies the kinds of satirical feminist writings typical of this section is "A Sex Difference"" in the A Woman's Sphere section is also redundant. The Release and Publication section should also be its own section.
Is any information out of date? Is anything missing that could be added?
The information appears to be all up-to-date. I think it would be helpful to have more content in the Reception section, since the bulk of it is a quotation. At least one more sentence summarizing would be helpful for making the section seem more complete.
Is the article neutral? Are there any claims that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?
The article is neutral and simply summarizes the sources.
Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?
No, the viewpoints appear to be fairly evenly represented. The inclusion of the reviews (public opinion) offsets any potential concern with noting the book's political aims/feminist and satirical alignment, which might make an inadvertent statement about the efficacy of the texts.
Check a few citations. Do the links work? Does the source support the claims in the article?
The links work and the sources support the article claims. There are minimal sources, but there appears to be very little information about this text available -- ten minutes of googling did not bring me to any other reliable sources.
Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Where does the information come from? Are these neutral sources? If biased, is that bias noted?
There are places where the specific source ought to be cited but isn't. For example, "This collection was neutral to positive in its initial critical reception." needs a citation. These sources are neutral: one is a scholarly article, one is a well-researched journal article, and one is the book itself.