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Daniel Hack. Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Pp. 284. $35.00 (cloth).
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Baraw, Charles |
| Copyright Year | 2018 |
| Abstract | One of the many inventive aspects of Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature is the way Daniel Hack enacts his central premises on the levels of structure and syntax. At its core, the book is about reversals and inversions—transformations of two cultures wrought by unexpected crossings of nation and race and time and space. In Hack’s careful account, these crossings do not efface historical and cultural borders (African American literature and Victorian literature remain distinct traditions with particular histories and ideologies, articulated in different ways by different practitioners), but they do connect and bind the parties together in mutually illuminating networks of literary borrowings, citations, and “repurposings” (21). Hack unfolds a traffic in the material of literary culture that he calls the “African Americanizing” of Victorian literature, and this traffic clearly goes both ways. “Victorian literature’s role as an important archive for the production of African American literature and print culture,” as Hack puts it, “makes African American literature and print culture an important archive for the study of Victorian literature”(2). The chiasmus that Hack shapes in this sentence reflects his historical and interpretive method and guides the organization of the six chapters that form the body of the book. The first three chapters examine the “afterlives” or uses that African American editors and writers find for the works of three major Victorian authors—Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot. These afterlives extend from mid-nineteenth-century reprints to extensive borrowings, appropriations, and citations that appear in works by African Americans through the turn of the twentieth century. In the second half of the book Hack reverses this structure to focus on three major African American writers, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, andW. E. B. Du Bois, and the varied uses they make of a range of Victorian literature over the course of their careers. This inverted, diachronic structure combined with the thoughtful methodology Hack calls “close reading at a distance” helps Reaping Something New show the pressing relevance of apparently simple questions: Why do Bleak House (1853), “Locksley Hall” (1869), “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), “The Spanish Gypsy” (1868), and other Victorian works, with apparently little to do with the issues and struggles engaging African Americans in the nineteenth century, occupy such prominent places in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, Hannah Crafts’s novel, The Bondswoman’s Daughter (2002), the later novels of Chesnutt and Hopkins, and the famous epigraphs of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903)? Similarly, why have scholars (in both fields) failed to recognize and account for this enduring preoccupation, which, Hack demonstrates, amounts to a coherent—and formative—tradition in African American literature and print culture? What, moreover, can attention to this tradition teach practitioners in the several fields upon which Hack’s work builds: the history of the book, reception studies, and cultural and literary studies, as well as comparative and transatlantic studies interested in the mobility of literary and cultural forms? While Hack is a conscientious explicator of his own purposes and practices, answering many of these questions in his introduction, perhaps the most valuable answers come in the aggregate, as he meticulously assembles a new and revelatory archive of citations and “meta-citations.” Some of Hack’s examples have been overlooked in plain sight; others are brought to light for the first time, but 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, whether it be the illustrative epigraph Anna Julia Cooper borrows and repurposes from Tennyson (a source omitted or occluded in Henry Louis Gates’s canon-making discussion of Cooper) or Hannah Crafts’s iteration of the famous opening paragraph of Bleak House, a text whose Book Reviews ▪ 197 |
| Starting Page | 197 |
| Ending Page | 198 |
| Page Count | 2 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1017/jbr.2017.220 |
| Volume Number | 57 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/275F56BCBC72D2F728236BB8E861F62D/S0021937117002209a.pdf/daniel_hack_reaping_something_new_african_american_transformations_of_victorian_literature_princeton_princeton_university_press_2017_pp_284_3500_cloth.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2017.220 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
