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

Florian Sedlmeier

doi:10.1515/zaa-2020-2030

Abstract

AbstractOpening 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.

Highlights

Realism and the Convertibility of Literary CapitalIn the preface to the first edition of his anthology The Negro Book of American Poetry James Weldon Johnson claims: “The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced” (Johnson 1922, p. 9)
Opening with James Weldon Johnson’s discourse on artistic greatness, I discuss William Dean Howells’s assessment of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W
Against charges of racial inferiority, they grew into a ‘standard’ and were converted into markers of national-cultural distinction. His inquiry turns to the question of racial authorial identity: “Is it not curious to know that the greatest poet of Russia is Alexander Pushkin, a man of African descent; that the greatest romancer of France is Alexandre Dumas, a man of African descent [...]?” (Johnson 1922, p. 21)

Summary

Realism and the Convertibility of Literary Capital

In the preface to the first edition of his anthology The Negro Book of American Poetry James Weldon Johnson claims: “The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced” (Johnson 1922, p. 9). Is what I call, with a nod to Bourdieu’s use of economic vocabulary, the convertibility of such differences into literary capital that in turn carries residuals of genteel standards and positions of social class, which most critics of the late nineteenth century cite in their rhetoric. Such convertibility is possible, not least because “the relative autonomy of the field” He marks both writers racially, but he leaves open the possibility that they refuse to be racial representatives

Howells and Dunbar

Howells and Chesnutt