Hardcover | 2016 | $35.00 | £27.95 | ISBN: 9780691169453
304 pp. | 6 x 9 | 12 line illus.

Tackling fraught but fascinating issues of cultural borrowing and appropriation, this groundbreaking book reveals that Victorian literature was put to use in African American literature and print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in much more intricate, sustained, and imaginative ways than previously suspected. From reprinting and reframing “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in an antislavery newspaper to reimagining David Copperfield and Jane Eyre as mixed-race youths in the antebellum South, writers and editors transposed and transformed works by the leading British writers of the day to depict the lives of African Americans and advance their causes. Central figures in African American literary and intellectual history—including Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and W.E.B. Du Bois—leveraged Victorian literature and this history of engagement itself to claim a distinctive voice and construct their own literary tradition.

In bringing these transatlantic transfigurations to light, this book also provides strikingly new perspectives on both canonical and little-read works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, and other Victorian authors. The recovery of these works’ African American afterlives illuminates their formal practices and ideological commitments, and forces a reassessment of their cultural impact and political potential. Bridging the gap between African American and Victorian literary studies, Reaping Something New changes our understanding of both fields and rewrites an important chapter of literary history.

A Symbiosis, Daemen College and University at Buffalo Event

Venue: Daemen College and the University at Buffalo, Amherst, New York, USA

Dates: Thursday 6th to Sunday 9th July, 2017

Keynote Speakers:

Eve Tavor Bannet, George Lynn Cross Professor of English, University of Oklahoma

Jahan Ramazani, University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, University of Virginia

The editors of Symbiosis, the Conference Directors, and Daemen College’s and the University at Buffalo’s Departments of English invite proposals for panels and individual papers of twenty-minute length, which engage a wide variety of transatlantic and/or transnational topics in the literatures and cultural histories of the Atlantic world. Especially welcome are presentations on the conference theme, Returns and Revisions: the eastward counterflow from New World to Old and revisionary literary texts and views on the discipline of Transatlantic Studies. Submissions are actively encouraged from all scholars and students of literary and cultural history and representation from every period from the earliest settlement right through to the present, including indigenous responses to imperial discourses.

Please submit 200–300 word abstracts with academic affiliation and contact details in Microsoft Word attachments by 3rd March, 2017 to both Conference Directors, Prof. Robert Morace (Daemen College) and Prof. Carrie Bramen (U at Buffalo): rmorace@daemen.edu and bramen@buffalo.edu. Add ‘Symbiosis 2017 Proposal’ to the subject line of your message, an essential detail since messages will be sorted automatically using this search term.

All inquiries are welcome; early acceptance may be possible if required for institutional or similar funding to facilitate attendance. Symbiosis cannot offer bursaries or fee waivers but will offer a reduced early rate. Further details will be posted on the conference and Symbiosis websites and on the journal’s Facebook page. See variously:

http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.wordpress.com/home/

http://www.symbiosistransatlantic.com
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/Glasgow-United-Kingdom/Symbiosis-a-Journal-of-Anglo-American-Literary-Relations/313163095816

by Daniel Maudlin (Author), Robin Peel (Author)

Taking a multidisciplinary approach to the complex cultural exchanges that took place between Britain and America from 1750 to 1900, The Materials of Exchange examines material, visual, and print culture alongside literature within a transatlantic context. The contributors trace the evolution of Anglo-American culture from its origins as a product of the British North Atlantic Empire through to its persistence in the post-Independence world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While transatlanticism is a well-established field in history and literary studies, this volume recognizes the wider diversity and interactions of transatlantic cultural production across material and visual cultures as well as literature. As such, while encompassing a range of fields and approaches within the humanities, the ten chapters are all concerned with understanding and interpreting the same Anglo-American culture within the same social contexts. The chapters integrate the literary with the material, offering alternative and provocative perspectives on topics ranging from the child-made book to representations of domestic slaves in literature, by way of history painting, travel writing, architecture and political plays. By focusing on cultural exchanges between Britain and the north-eastern maritime United States over nearly two centuries, the collection offers an in-depth study of Britain’s relationship with a single region of North America over an extended historic period. Contributors have resisted the temptation to prioritize the relationship between New England and England in particular by placing this association within the contexts of Atlantic exchanges with other northeastern states as well as with the South, the Caribbean and Scotland. Intended for researchers in literature, visual and material culture, this collection challenges single-subject boundaries by redefining transatlantic studies as the collective examination of the complex and interrelated cultural transactions that crisscrossed the Atlantic through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

by Harald E. Braun (Author), Jesús Pérez-Magallón (Author)

Gathering a group of internationally renowned scholars, this volume presents cutting-edge research on the complex processes of identity formation in the transatlantic world of the Hispanic Baroque. Identities in the Hispanic world are deeply intertwined with sociological concepts such as class and estate, with geography and religion (i.e. the mixing of Spanish Catholics with converted Jews, Muslims, Dutch and German Protestants), and with issues related to the ethnic diversity of the world’s first transatlantic empire and its various miscegenations. Contributors to this volume offer the reader diverse vantage points on the challenging problem of how identities in the Hispanic world may be analyzed and interpreted. A number of contributors relate earlier processes and formations to Neo-Baroque and postmodern conceptualisations of identity. Given the strong interest in identity and identity-formation within contemporary cultural studies, the book will be of interest to a broad group of readers from the fields of law, geography, history, anthropology and literature.

by Erik Redling (Editor)

This study seeks to fill a major gap in the fields of Nineteenth-Century American and British Studies by examining how nineteenth-century intellectuals shape and re-shape aesthetic traditions across the Atlantic Ocean. The study explores the roles of salient traveling concepts, such as realism, translation, the picturesque, and imagination, and traces their at times surprising paths within ever-widening transnational intellectual networks.

by Elvira Pulitano (Author)

This book offers a timely intervention in current debates on diaspora and diasporic identity by affirming the importance of narrative as a discursive mode to understand the human face of contemporary migrations and dislocations. Focusing on the Caribbean double-diaspora, Pulitano offers a close-reading of a range of popular works by four well-known writers currently living in the United States: Jamaica Kincaid, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Caryl Phillips. Navigating the map of fictional characters, testimonial accounts, and autobiographical experiences, Pulitano draws attention to the lived experience of contemporary diasporic formations. The book offers a provocative re-thinking of socio-scientific analyses of diaspora by discussing the embodied experience of contemporary diasporic communities, drawing on disciplines such as Caribbean, Postcolonial, Diaspora, and Indigenous Studies along with theories on “border thinking” and coloniality/modernity. Contesting restrictive, national, and linguistic boundaries when discussing literature originating from the Caribbean, Pulitano situates the transnational location of Caribbean-born writers within current debates of Transnational American Studies and investigates the role of immigrant writers in discourses of race, ethnicity, citizenship, and belonging. Exploring the multifarious intersections between home, exile, migration and displacement, the book makes a significant contribution to memory and trauma studies, human rights debates, and international law, aiming at a wide range of scholars and specialized agents beyond the strictly literary circle. This volume affirms the humanity of personal stories and experiences against the invisibility of immigrant subjects in most theoretical accounts of diaspora and migration.