"Honorable Mention for the 2018 NAVSA Book Prize, North American Victorian Studies Association" Daniel Hack is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel.
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. "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." "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 f
