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

Anyone who works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American literature knows how necessary it is to keep a bookshelf nearby of all of the works of classical, biblical, and British literature that African American authors have cited, critiqued, reworked, or simply alluded to since Phillis Wheatley began the practice in 1773, referencing Ovid, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and a host of others. Some writers provide a handy list of authors, as Frederick Douglass did in 1845, directing readers to The Columbian Orator (over two dozen, from Cicero to Franklin!), or as Charles Chesnutt did in 1900, in listing the Great Books on John Warwick’s bookshelf in The House behind the Cedars (a dozen more, including Milton, Cervantes, and Scott). The canon of African American literature is so very rich and was for so very long ignored by literature scholars outside of historically black colleges and universities (who have always read works by black writers now tagged as “little known”), that the work of excavating, uncovering, and republishing literature by African American writers—along with the work of reading these texts in conversation with other African American texts—has been the primary aim of African American literature scholars for the past several decades. As the bookshelves filled with African American literature have expanded, so too has that other bookshelf, the one holding Ovid, Burns, Scott, and other texts black authors have alluded to. The ongoing task of analyzing the ways that these bookshelves are in conversation with each other is increasingly daunting.

Accordingly, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New is warmly welcome, with its detailed readings of African American literary engagement with Charles Dickens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. Reaping Something New details so many of the myriad ways that African American authors throughout the nineteenth century read, drew upon, deliberately misread, toyed with, signified upon, contended with, dismissed, and admired Victorian works of literature that, perhaps unintentionally, Hack quickly ends up contradicting his own central argument that these engagements were “unlikely” (1). From Wheatley onward, African American literature has been in deep, playful, and abiding conversation with the broader literary canon as key scholars on the category of African American literature from Henry Louis Gates, Jr. to Kenneth Warren have argued. One of Hack’s tremendous contributions, in fact, is to gather together the many strands of scholarship on African American literary engagement with (primarily) British texts and present them meticulously, systematically, and thoroughly, arguing for a process he calls the “African Americanization” of these texts. “African Americanizations,” Hack argues, “make newly salient the specific ways and ends to which Victorian novels and poems do or do not represent individuals of African descent (and members of nonwhite races more generally) . . . [and] can also call into question the importance of race in texts in which it has always seemed central” (3). Hack sees African American writers’ engagement with Victorian texts as “close reading at a distance” (3). He offers new ways to look at Victorian texts and new ways to understand African American literature from specific, granular examples.

Hack’s chapters reflect his training as a Victorianist and his emphasis on the two-way street of African American and Victorian textual engagement. In his Introduction, he begins to demonstrate his method by looking at the first paragraph of Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), in which Cooper inserts three lines from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H. (1850), without attribution but with a provocative italicization: “An infant crying in the night, / An infant crying for the light; / And with no language—but a cry.” Closely reading this fruitful engagement yields a richer understanding of Cooper, of Tennyson, and of the various scholars and critics over the years who have seen, not seen, or misunderstood the allusion (though surely not “suppressed” [6]). Next, chapter one, “Close Reading Bleak House at a Distance,” offers an updated version of Hack’s 2008...