Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature
How African American writers used Victorian literature to create a literature of their own

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

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Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature
How African American writers used Victorian literature to create a literature of their own

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

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Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

by Daniel Hack
Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature
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Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

by Daniel Hack

Overview

How African American writers used Victorian literature to create a literature of their own

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing "The Charge of the Light Brigade" in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works' African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780691169453
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Publication date: 11/29/2016
Pages: 304
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Daniel Hack is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction The African Americanization of Victorian Literature 1

1 Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance 23

2 (Re-) Racializing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” 45

3 Affiliating with George Eliot 76

4 Racial Mixing and Textual Remixing: Charles Chesnutt 102

5 Cultural Transmission and Transgression: Pauline Hopkins 135

6 The Citational Soul of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois 176

Afterword After Du Bois 205

Notes 213

Bibliography 259

Index 273

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Reaping Something New bypasses the obvious strategy of scanning Victorian texts for African American characters or settings, asking instead how African American readers and writers appropriated and transformed precisely those Victorian texts whose subject matter appeared most distant from their own lives. By situating the connection between Victorian and African American texts at the level of reception rather than theme, Daniel Hack makes his conclusions both more surprising and more irrefutable. The question he raises about the afterlife of texts is a central one to literary criticism today and his book provides a model for scholars working across literary periods."—Leah Price, author of How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

"Daniel Hack's innovative study of nineteenth-century African American writers' attunement to contemporaneous British writing shows how Victorian literature offered a rich and varied resource for authors such as Frederick Douglass, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois. His insightful analysis of the citation, refiguration, and recontextualization of works by Tennyson, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot gives us a new sense of these texts' signifying capacities and, crucially, sheds light on the social and racial exclusions internal to British literature."—Meredith McGill, Rutgers University

"Making an audacious and persuasive case that African American literature was an archive essential to Victorian literature, and vice versa, Daniel Hack reaps something new about what counts as ‘race' writing. By using African Americanization to reread nineteenth-century literature, he reveals the ghost in the Victorian machine. This is a must-read."—Susan Gillman, University of California, Santa Cruz

"Like Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism or Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, this compelling book promises a transformative reshaping of intellectual history and interpretative practice, helping set the tone for the next generation of scholars. The best kind of literary criticism and cultural history, Reaping Something New represents a major step forward for Victorian and African American studies."—Lloyd Pratt, University of Oxford

"Bold, ambitious, and unprecedented, this landmark study contributes to African American, Victorian, and transatlantic studies by bringing them into illuminating relationship. Revealing the complex aesthetic and rhetorical strategies African American writers developed in response to Victorian literature, Daniel Hack is entirely persuasive that these writers were engaging not in mere allusion, imitation, parody, or displays of cultural capital, but rather a deliberate, self-aware mode of creativity and commentary."—Linda K. Hughes, Texas Christian University

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