LAUSR

In its consideration of the various ways in which African American and British Victorian literatures were mutually entangled, Daniel Hack’s Reaping Something New: African American Transformations of Victorian Literature (2017) does indeed reap something new through its enlargement of our critical perspectives on both literary traditions. Whereas Henry Louis Gates’s Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (1987) focused on ways in which African American authors troped on literary narratives within a tradition of black writing, Hack expands this intertextual method to encompass Atlantic literary production more widely. He shows, for example, that Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) was reprinted in 1855 in Frederick Douglass’s Paper, and that it was subsequently deployed by Paul Dunbar in his 1895 poem “The Colored Soldiers” to celebrate the role of African American troops in the American Civil War. The title of Hack’s book is taken from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1869), with the author being willing to countenance a mode of what he calls “deracializing decontextualization” in his analysis of how Victorian poems and novels were re-read in widely (and wildly) varying circumstances (79). Hack’s implicit conjunction of a canonical Tennyson poem with his analysis of “African American Transformations of Victorian Literature” highlights his interest in how questions of race travel and circulate among different textual