{"id":47815,"date":"2016-11-02T20:55:14","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T20:55:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=47815"},"modified":"2017-03-03T20:31:30","modified_gmt":"2017-03-03T20:31:30","slug":"reaping-something-new-african-american-transformations-of-victorian-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=47815","title":{"rendered":"Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Princeton University Press<\/a>
\nNovember 2016
\n304 pages
\n6 x 9
\n12 line illus.
\nHardcover ISBN: 9780691169453
\neBook ISBN: 9781400883745<\/p>\n

Daniel Hack<\/strong><\/a>, Associate Professor of English
\nUniversity of Michigan<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature<\/a> 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 \u201cThe Charge of the Light Brigade<\/a>\u201d in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield<\/a> and Jane Eyre<\/a> as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South<\/a>, 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\u2014including Frederick Douglass<\/a>, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper<\/a>, Charles Chesnutt<\/a>, Pauline Hopkins<\/a>, and W.E.B. Du Bois<\/a>\u2014leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.<\/p>\n

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens<\/a>, George Eliot<\/a>, Alfred, Lord Tennyson<\/a>, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works\u2019 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<\/em> changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n