Every culture wants a literature of its own, a canon of works that reflects something deep and unique about an imagined community larger than the individual.
In the 18th century, writers like Joseph Addison and Samuel Johnson sought to identify in Shakespeare and Milton a distinctive English literary tradition, and in the 19th century writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot contributed deliberately to it. In the early United States, anxious and ambitious writers aimed to throw off “the courtly muses of Europe,” as Emerson famously wrote, and create their own independent American literature. African-American writers since the 19th century have advocated a distinctively black literature and aesthetic, and in the 20th century countless American groups followed suit, attempting the Asian-American novel, the Chicano/a novel, the Jewish novel, the gay novel, and so on.
Literature is often valued because it expresses something essential about what it means to belong to a particular culture and in turn legitimizes cultural identity. For a long while, culture was understood primarily in national terms, but now the term is used to describe any kind of group with a discrete identity and its own traditions, ways of life, and shared history of triumph or tragedy.
The wide recognition of an independent literary tradition is arguably one of the most important goals a people can achieve, but the stakes vary radically from case to case. For Victorians, English literature reflected the triumph of the British Empire. For Emerson’s generation, founding an American literature was a quest for national pride. For African-Americans, in contrast, writing literature has long been a matter of survival. Black writers in the age of slavery and scientific racism faced powerful Enlightenment ideologies that privileged artistic genius as a sign of humanity. The creation and recognition of African-American literature would “put our enemies to the blush,” as the abolitionist William Hamilton put it as early as 1809, and prove that black people were fully human and deserving of equal rights. This literature-equality link (long contested, long pursued) remained relevant at least up through the civil-rights era and the rise of the Black Arts movement in the 1960s.
This strictly cultural understanding of literature has long dominated scholarly and pedagogical practices in English departments despite ample forces working against it, including the fierce cosmopolitanism of authors eager to transcend cultural identity and hundreds of scholarly books written in the transnational, cross-cultural, or comparative mode. In his fascinating and original new book, Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature, Daniel Hack provocatively joins the contrarian chorus by examining the relationship between one of the most marginalized literary traditions and one of the most dominant. He has found that a wide range of the most important 19th-century African-American writers drew from and engaged with writers of equal importance to the Victorian literary tradition.
Frederick Douglass serialized Dickens’s Bleak House in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as it was first being published in England and printed extensive commentary on the novel. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and others turned to George Eliot’s little-known dramatic poem “The Spanish Gypsy” and reworked its minoritarian nationalist rhetoric to find an analogy between the plight of the Romani people and the African-American experience. Charles Chesnutt imagined a biracial David Copperfield in The House Behind the Cedars, rewriting that bildungsroman’s famous scene of childhood reading, and Pauline Hopkins borrowed copiously from Tennyson and Bulwer-Lytton in Of One Blood. W.E.B. Du Bois paired Victorian poetry with black spirituals in more complicated epigraphical gestures than previous scholars of The Souls of Black Folk have recognized. These are just a few highlights among scores of cross-cultural encounters Hack analyzes to make his case that Victorian literature heavily influenced African-American writers — even as Victorian writers themselves all but ignored or even disdained African-Americans as a people.
Hack is well aware of the risk in tracing what seems like the black literary tradition’s dependence on white culture. Indeed, scholars of African-American literature have mostly overlooked these kinds of engagements or dismissed them as derivative and embarrassing. (Though not entirely: Hack points to Frances Smith Foster, Carla Peterson, and Ann duCille as important predecessors who have taken seriously black writers’ interest in British literature.) In helping to fill this still substantial scholarly gap, Hack is banking on the idea that a monocultural understanding of literature is less politically urgent than it used to be within African-American studies. But in identifying and tracing the specific way Victorian literature found a unique home in African-American literature, he also offers a new understanding of the latter’s distinctiveness, complexity, and internal coherence.
He dispenses with the objection that the phenomenon he has identified smacks of cultural dependence. What he calls the “African Americanization of Victorian literature” was a complex process that developed its own self-reflexive practices over decades among black writers highly aware of and inspired by each other. When Hopkins and Du Bois cited or appropriated Tennyson, for example, they referred to and revised previous African-Americanizations of Tennyson from earlier in the century. This argument is grounded in many archival discoveries and often brilliant close readings of allusions, engagements, and appropriations.
Hack’s earlier work was on the Victorian novel, and one of the strengths of Reaping Something New lies in the fact that only a trained Victorianist is likely to have read and absorbed as much 19th-century British literature as Americans — white or black — did at the time. Scholars of African-American literature have preferred to examine other inspirations for the 19th-century canon: its grounding in the experience of slavery and the slave trade, in abolitionism, in the fight against virulent racism and white supremacy, in African tradition and culture, in community activism and racial uplift, in the black church and religious life, and in orality, performance, and Signifyin(g). But many working in African-American studies will appreciate the efforts of a Victorianist who has spent nearly a decade excavating the fascinating, innovative, and unlikely engagements that major black writers sustained with their peers across the Atlantic — whom they clearly read with passion, skepticism, and intensity.
Hack’s contribution will therefore be appreciated in multiple fields, in African-American studies, American studies, and Victorian studies. His 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. It will be appreciated especially among scholars working against the view that any literary tradition belongs strictly to one people, or nation, or another.
Joseph Rezek is an assistant professor of English at Boston University and the author of London and the Making of Provincial Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015).
