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Preface This book began in the classroom,in a graduate seminar I taught on Realism and Naturalism in which we were discussing George Washington Cable’s story “Belles Demoiselles Plantation.”In the process of dealing with the historical and racial aspects of the situation, a student asked how it could be that the mixed-race character owned a mansion in New Orleans and had sufficient financial resources to have lent $180,000 to his white relative over the years. Injin Charlie does not seem to work, and yet he is quite wealthy. Charles De Charleu, a white aristocrat with a plantation and seven beautiful daughters, seems impoverished in comparison.Why, the student asked, would the ancestor have married a Choctaw woman and then,without benefit of a divorce, a white woman in Paris? Would this be legal? Would the children from each of these marriages feel a kinship strong enough to warrant such enormous loans? These were reasonable inquiries,insightful,probing , significant, and I could not answer them with any degree of certainty. This book, in a real sense, is an attempt to answer the questions raised on that day some four years ago in a seminar at the University of Georgia. It has taken me, rather late in my career, on a long and fascinating journey through time, geography, and cultural history, and along the way I have encountered French colonial history, the Code Noir, the plaçage tradition, the various flags that have flown over New Orleans, the complex racial stratification that guided social interaction in Louisiana, the Spanish introduction of the slave contract, the changing meanings of the word “Creole,” the founding of one of the great cities in the world, and the reason why many traditional Creoles would not cross Canal Street. It was a challenging and intriguing journey,and it brought to life for me a region of the United States unlike any other. x Preface I found the artistic expression of these ideas in the short stories of four important writers who lived in New Orleans in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period in American literary history that emphasized the Local-Color tradition of capturing the dialects, folkways, culture, and personalities of nearly every region of the United States. Although my own background is in northern Minnesota, originally another French settlement at the very origin of the Mississippi River, I found myself engrossed in the world at the other end of it, especially in the work of Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Grace King, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson. What these writers shared was not only that many of their stories take place in New Orleans but that they had all lived there, absorbed Louisiana culture on the bustling streets of the French Quarter, and derived their understanding of the people and social values of the lower Mississippi during their years in the Crescent City.Grace King spent her life there,but Alice Dunbar-Nelson and George Washington Cable eventually moved north,as did Kate Chopin, residing the last two decades of her life in her native St. Louis. Nonetheless, she wrote exclusively of Louisiana and New Orleans, the richest setting of her experience and the locus for the work of the other writers as well. In the course of her lifetime, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was born Alice Moore, married Paul Laurence Dunbar to become Alice Dunbar, and later married to become Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the manner in which she is consistently referred to in scholarship. I have followed that convention. My specific focus became a story cycle by each of them, a collection of interrelated short fiction with continuing characters, settings, and themes. In a sense, my interest was an outgrowth of a decade of research for an earlier book, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle:The Ethnic Resonance of Genre, which discussed the long history of the genre and its popularity in the last decades of the twentieth century. In the course of my reading, I was delighted to find that this approach to literature was even more popular at the end of the nineteenth century in the heyday of the short stories that flooded the hundreds of new magazines that flourished with the expanding population of the country.Throughout this investigation, I have been aware that scholarly books share some common properties: they are essentially a formulation of tentative propositions representing the state of knowledge at a given point, a position awaiting new information, or a fresh interpretation of...

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