Editor's Note

This collection of papers on Pauline Hopkins's writing inaugurates a new online feature of American Literary History, which we are calling the ALH Forum. After 30 years exclusively as a print journal, we are now committing to electronic publication a new series of essays, symposia, polemics, DH studies, exchanges, and more. In ways that resonate with our Online Review, ALH Forum pieces will take further advantage of the faster and readier means of distribution that e-publishing affords. Some of these essays, papers, reports, or polemics will be especially well served through website publication, with images or hyperlinks or some other feature. Some pieces may call for replies, responses that can be posted more promptly than print allows. And some have an urgency that we think demands more immediate circulation. This new range of content, appearing intermittently through the year, is tantamount to a fifth issue, so please regard these contributions as you would any of our print articles and essay-reviews. Readers who have signed up for OUP's e-alerts will get timely notices when a new posting appears (so please register for that free service, if you haven't already). If there's an idea that you'd like to see included, please write to the Assistant Editor (assistanteditor.alh@gmail.com). We welcome your suggestions.

This symposium on Pauline Hopkins models one kind of contribution we'd like to highlight, with papers addressing an issue of current interest to specialists and of potential interest to other Americanists too. Like the other ALH Forum contributions to come, this symposium is made up of contributions from various viewpoints, all delving into the complexity of its subject and drawing from those deliberations a richer, subtler understanding of Hopkins in a crucial aspect of how to write American literary history. That commitment to a multifaceted historiography in this case—its political, formal, cultural, identitarian dimensions—makes this forum perhaps even more amenable to e-publishing.

"Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and African American Cultural Production" begins with Richard Yarborough's personal and institutional history of reading Hopkins, the changing conditions of her reception, and how her example bears on African American literary history. JoAnn Pavletich confronts the extensiveness of Hopkins's plagiarism, but in contradistinction to Geoffrey Sanborn, whose 2015 essay on Of One Blood (1903) reignited scholarly interest in the general subject of Hopkins's borrowings, Paveletich situates Hopkins's practices according to the norms of their day.

In turn, Ira Dworkin continues this investigation with his inquiry into an underexamined context for reading Hopkins, namely her fictional and nonfiction sources from the African continent, including travel narratives, which sometimes came across her desk as the editor of the Colored American Magazine. Doing so enables Dworkin to pose fresh and challenging questions about Hopkins's reading and writing. Lauren Dembowitz returns to the tropes so well identified with Hopkins, womanhood and passing, and explores how unacknowledged sources and appropriations from a story published in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, Fanny Driscoll's "Two Women" (1884), helped to shape Hopkins's purposes in Hagar's Daughter (1902).

Readers will find that beyond the sensationalism of the claims of plagiarism, scholars have taken the critical potential of this discussion to a more substantive level and have demonstrated the uses to which these findings give rise. So I hope you'll read our Hopkins symposium and that you will turn to the ALH Forum as a regular feature of your online readings in American literary history.