ABSTRACT
Having ascended to popularity in the mid 1880s, the black dialect tale and its stylized presentation of black voice was conventional by the time Charles Chesnutt submitted, in the late 1880s, a collection of stories that would (in part) later become The Conjure Woman. Chesnutt, however, unlike Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page, does not romanticize slavery; Julius' stories instead revolve around slavery's antebellum terrors at the same time that they call into question postbellum "solutions." Chesnutt's response in The Conjure Woman to this appropriation is seen almost indisputably by critics to be the African American workings of conjure, a view most eloquently expressed by Houston Baker in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chesnutt, exploits conjure's failings in order to pull its metamorphoses apart and argue for differences, as he opens up for inspection the gaps that conjure, on the surface, might seem to close.
