Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature by Daniel Hack (review)

Delivering on its title, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature not only presents a compelling and original study of the ways African American writers at the turn of the twentieth century appropriated, revised and reimagined Victorian literature, but also offers a new interpretive model for the conduct of literary scholarship in the future. By combining “close reading at a distance” with an examination of the circulation, reception and uses of texts by diverse and often geographically and temporally disparate audiences, Hack expands upon Franco Moretti’s theory of distant reading to create a critical lens that challenges the traditional new historicist focus on the original and immediate historical context of the work.

In many ways, this interpretative method also provides a focus for the entire book, since the readers-turned-writers chosen by Hack often used Victorian literature to think about the racial and national distances between texts and readers. Thus, Hack reinvigorates close reading as a scholarly practice by showing how formal and rhetorical analysis can lend itself to nuanced and politically relevant cultural criticism. For both Hack and the writers he examines, close reading is not “apolitical” or “too narrowly academic,” a familiar charge in contemporary scholarly discussions, but rather emerges as a productive tool, not only for questioning and combating the dominant culture but also for carving out a space for counter-cultural expression (4).

Bringing together the methodologies of book history, print culture and literary studies, Hack explores how the afterlives of texts shape the way we read the original source text, thus moving beyond a straightforward reception study. Hack does not simply ask how and why Victorian novels and poetry became fertile ground for African American literary production; instead, he reverses the traditional unidirectional narrative of influence by contending that nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literature provides “an important archive for the study of Victorian literature” (2). According to Hack, “[r]ecovering the African American uses of Victorian literature not only increases our knowledge of its dissemination, mobility, and adaptability but also, and thereby, contributes to our understanding of that literature itself” (2). Re-reading canonical Victorian works through the eyes of their African American readers and adaptors prompts modern scholars to reconsider the political and ideological implications of these texts.

While the unauthorized reprinting of British works in the American periodical press has attracted attention, with scholars like Hack even noting the appearance of British texts in abolitionist newspapers, most studies have treated these moments of transatlantic literary exchange and recontextualization as isolated and idiosyncratic episodes in print culture. Hack, however, suggests that for African American writers and editors, these instances of appropriation are not random but rather deliberate moves. Read together, he argues, they reveal a sustained and multivalent intellectual engagement with nineteenth-century British literature taken up by some of the most foundational and celebrated figures of the African American literary community.

From Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois, African American writers turned to the practice of what Hack calls “African Americanization,” or the citation and revision of “specific features of selected Victorian poems and novels at the levels of diction, phrasing, dialogue, characterization, and plot” (2). Ranging from reframing and racializing (or, as he argues in the case of Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” re-racializing) poems and novels through paratextual elements and new print contexts, re-writing beloved Victorian characters as mixed-race protagonists, or staging scenes in which the act of reading Victorian literature is juxtaposed with the lived experience of readers who struggle to find traces of themselves within the pages, these transformative textual moments do not render African American literature indebted to or derivative of Victorian literature but rather help forge a distinct African American literary tradition of “self-conscious and self-referential” citation and adaptation (2). These authors utilized Victorian literature not in order to claim that art has the power...