Chapter 1 - Riffraff and Half-Strainers

Summary

Chapter one maps out a national conversation about poor white southerners that took shape in the pages of late nineteenth-century literary magazines. In this section, I argue that nonfiction essays in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras launched a lively debate about poor white southerners’ roles in the nation that continued in the dialect fiction tales published by the august and influential Atlantic group of magazines during the 1880s and 1890s.I analyze how classist portrayals of poor white southern identity shaped the work of local colorists and plantation fiction writers in order to set the backdrop for how Charles Chesnutt pioneered literary forms capable of representing poor white characters in new ways. Chesnutt adapts the frame narrative structure—the hallmark of plantation stories—with an eye toward challenging the denigrating representations of poor white southerners promulgated by writers including Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page.