Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt ed. by Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig Donald Shaffer Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2017. 190 pp. $40.00 hardcover, $24.00 paper, $24.00 electronic. The resurgence of scholarship within the last two decades examining the literary career of Charles W. Chesnutt owes largely to his unique place in the African American literary canon. Chesnutt’s novels and short stories were influenced by nineteenth-century slave narratives and the popular genre of plantation fiction. He expanded the scope of black lived experience represented in the narratives of enslaved black people while decisively pushing back against the racist depictions of plantation life made popular by authors such as Thomas Nelson Page. His investment in themes of black respectability set him apart from the more tendentious protest fiction of the Harlem Renaissance just two decades on the horizon. [End Page 299] Approaches to Teaching the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt wonderfully explores Chesnutt’s fiction in this socio-historical context. Editors Susanna Ashton and Bill Hardwig have collected essays that utilize this critical framework as a basis for developing pedagogy and classroom instruction. The volume is divided into two parts beginning with a short section that describes both the early and more recent critical reception of Chesnutt and his work. There is some mention of primary source materials, including the important collection of Chesnutt papers and manuscripts housed at Fisk University in Nashville—although it would have been useful to include a more detailed description of that collection as well as of the smaller collection of Chesnutt papers housed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The second section, which constitutes most of the volume, includes essays on topics that range from “engaging the dialect” in Chesnutt’s fiction to marshaling critical race theory in analyzing his work. The several essays that explore the important topic of Chesnutt’s use of black vernacular and dialect are particularly useful. Chesnutt made frequent use of black dialect in his fiction, especially in works such as his short story collection The Conjure Woman. For a variety of reasons, approaching this manner of speech in the classroom can pose some linguistic and ethical challenges. In “Toward a Usable Dialect: Chesnutt’s Language in the Classroom,” Jeffrey W. Miller details a series of assignments that endeavor to acquaint students with Chesnutt’s use of black dialect in comparison to black dialect as it appears in the fiction of his contemporaries. In “Releasing the Linguistic Shackles: Chesnutt’s Verbal and Nonverbal Discourse,” Mary E. Brown Zeigler explores the tacit meaning that shades the dialogue of Chesnutt’s characters. Both essays highlight the interrelatedness of language, social class, and race in Chesnutt’s fiction. They also offer approaches for “performing” black dialect in the classroom as a way of engaging issues of race in Chesnutt. The essays that consider Chesnutt’s other short fiction similarly focus on his investment in a black vernacular tradition. The contributors offer here various approaches for engaging students in discussions about the built environment of slavery, the function of superstition, and the use of the Southern Gothic mode in Chesnutt’s short stories. These essays highlight the ways in which Chesnutt’s portrayal of black vernacular and lived experience provide a literary vantage point for students [End Page 300] to understand the history of the era. Describing her approach to teaching “The Bouquet,” Ernestine Pickens Glass writes, “my purpose . . . is to help students understand the restrictions, limitations, and inhumanity of the Jim Crow era and discover, in that era, examples of kindness, civility, courage, and humane behavior” (125). The remaining essays describe approaches to teaching the novels. Hollis Robbins discusses his approach to teaching The House Behind the Cedars by emphasizing the function of Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe as metatext in the novel. Ryan Simmons discusses his teaching of the same novel in a literary theory class. Other contributors, such as Margaret D. Bauer, Gregory Laski, and Trinyan Paulsen Mariano, discuss approaches to teaching The Marrow of Tradition as a novel...