2010 VanArsdel Prize Essay: Literary Graftings: Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative and the Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reader

This paper suggests that the most productive way to read Hannah Crafts, alleged author of the unpublished manuscript The Bondwoman's Narrative, is not as an author but rather as a reader of nineteenth-century transatlantic periodicals. After theorizing Crafts in terms of authorship and then in terms of nineteenth-century serial reading practices, the analysis shifts to an examination of Frederick Douglass's Paper in which Charles Dickens's Bleak House, the text that Crafts most unapologetically "borrows" from in her narrative, was reprinted in order to hypothesize how a reader could be influenced to make the disjointed appropriations that characterize her narrative.