Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature

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Description

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 m

Reviews

"Honorable Mention for the 2018 NAVSA Book Prize, North American Victorian Studies Association"
"The first full-length study of this extensive literary dialogue across the Atlantic . . . . There might be thought to be a danger here of undermining African American cultural history by reaffirming the centrality of a white Anglo-American canon. Yet Daniel Hack puts his writers on an equal footing--it is the intertextual dialogue that matters here, above all . . . . Reaping Something New should encourage those who devise modern English Literature courses to include more African American literature, not merely as a specialization option, but as an integral part of the canon."---Ada Coghen, Times Literary Supplement
"[F]ascinating and original. . . . Hack's skill and sensitivity as a literary critic and the thoroughness of his research make Reaping Something New one of the most compelling works of trans-Atlantic literary scholarship to appear in recent years."---Joseph Rezek, Chronicle of Higher Education
"As Hack observes, the relationship between Victorian literature and African American literature has been neglected, and this book fills that gap." * Choice *
"Ambitious and elegantly written. . . . By revealing the deep entanglement between two literary traditions that are often treated in isolation, and linking his superb readings to key concerns of African American and Victorian literary studies, Daniel Hack has written the rare book sure to make a lasting impression across multiple fields."---Benjamin Fagan, Nineteenth Century Literature
"Hack not only ranges knowledgeably across but significantly advances the fields of Victorian and nineteenth-century African-American literature. . . . With fine-grained analysis and archival research indispensable to his documentation and analysis of literary borrowing, Hack nonetheless joins forces with Book History scholars and advocates of distance reading to explore the transatlantic, cross-cultural afterlives' of Victorian texts in African-American literature."---Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Review of English Studies
"Reaping Something New is a special book. One leaves it with full awareness that not many critics could have written it, as it requires a deep knowledge of British Victorian texts and a full immersion into nineteenth- century American print culture and with Americanist theory and criticism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. . . . This book stands as one of our best arguments for thinking about literary traditions as intertwined and dialogic rather than separate and distinctive."---Melissa Jenkins, Modern Philology
"A compelling and original study of the ways African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century appropriated, revised and reimagined Victorian literature . . . [that] offers a new interpretive model for the conduct of literary scholarship in the future."---Rebecca D. Soares, Dickens Quarterly
"No one has ever put together the rich history of editorial and compositional practices Reaping Something New presents. And few literary and cultural studies match the scrupulous attention Hack gives to each case he brings forward."---Charles Baraw, Journal of British Studies
"Hack registers the ways that the African-American press borrowed key elements of Victorian literature, refashioning them in new contexts to elicit previously unseen meanings--or to shine a particularly bright light on meanings that had been there all along. In their American reworking, the racial politics of the Victorian texts become differently visible. Hacks immense knowledge of both fields enables him to catch echoes of extraordinarily obscure phrases and to identify authors of pseudonymous work across decades, demonstrating how intimately intertwined American race and Victorian literary forms really were."---Talia Schaffer, Studies in English Literature
"Reaping Something New is unquestionably an important, eye-opening study whose example should inspire further scholarship both within and beyond the fields of African American and Victorian studies. Hacks close reading at a distance has applications across periods as does the powerful and useful concept of metacitationality. Smart, generative, and a pleasure to read, Hacks book will be teaching us how to reap new things for years to come."---Brian Sweeney, American Literary History
"[W]hether we should call Reaping Something New close reading at a distance or distant reading up close is no matter; let us just call it what it isliterary history at is best."---Nicholas T. Rinehart, Modern Language Quarterly

Author Bio

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