Writing at the height of the local color craze during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, George Washington Cable is mostly known for his short stories Old Creole Days (1876), the novella Madame Delphine (1881), and the novel The Grandissimes (1879/80), which are all set in the strange, mysterious world of antebellum francophone New Orleans and which were all first published in Century Magazine. For this periodical, which considered Cable its “star author” and systematically promoted him in its pages, Cable also wrote articles on African-American music and dance, a beautifully illustrated history of New Orleans, and many other texts, however, which are almost forgotten today. In this seminar, we will not only read Cable’s texts, all of which are available online, but also use a periodical studies approach to examine his relationship with Century and the magazine’s promotional campaign for the writer.
- Lehrende(r): Florian Freitag