The House Behind the Cedars

Charles Chesnutt

Dis 2007 · Kuthengiswe ngu-Modern Library

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Charles Chesnutt’s classic novel, hailed by Werner Sollors as “a pioneering work of racial passing.”

Edited and featuring an introduction and notes from Judith Jackson Fossett.
 
A riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life, The House Behind the Cedars follows John and Rena Walden, mixed-race siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The siblings travel carefully between Black and white worlds, but their precarious routine is threatened when Rena falls in love with a white man and hides her true heritage to start a life with him.
 
This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African American writers. As Werner Sollors writes, “William Dean Howells did not overstate his case when he compared Chesnutt’s works with those by Turgenev, Maupassant, and James.”

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Judith Jackson Fossett, associate professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, is the author of Illuminated Darkness: Slavery and Its Shadows in Nineteenth-Century America and the editor of Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century.