Dickens Universe - "Frances E.W. Harper in Transatlantic Context"

Virtual Dickens Universe: Frances Harper in a Transatlantic Context 7/30/20

• Danny Hack (Michigan), Meredith McGill (Rutgers), Carla Peterson (UMD!)
• l/u Black Bibliography project (McGill)
• importance of thinking outside inherited frameworks and comfort zones: transatlantic Black and Victorian lit more conventionally conceived

• Hack
  • Harper attended closely to Vic lit
  • help us think about ideological/formal affordances of vic lit in a different way. Its blind spots and our own
  • Harper and Eliot: for Af Am readers in late c19 black print culture she was the author of the Spanish Gypsy (l/u his work on this),
  • Harper had most sustained engagement with this
  • mattered bc Black writers felt it meant something to their own context
  • takes up the tragic mulatto story
  • Iola Leroy is a response to this tradition
  • with Harper's help, we can see Eliot is telling a part of the story of identifying with the enslaved abjected race (in this case, gypsies)
  • there's an asymmetry in disciplinary training: Victorianists have read a lot less AfAm lit than vice versa for AfAm specialists

• Carla Peterson
  • early African American print culture studies
  • Colored Convention Movement project
  • rereading practices
  • Anglo-African Magazine essays by Harper
  • AfAm reading societies from 1820s in Philly and NYC: what did they actually read? ** Fascinated with British and Scottish enlightenment (sensibility [inner moral self], sociability, and sympathy)
  • Maroon community in Brazil
  • import for an AfAm: that they have sensibility, everyone has "character" to be developed
  • sociability: like-minded conviviality and conversation (Harper represents this a lot)
  • sympathy: Adam Smith -- not identifying with someone in pain but imagining what they're feeling

• McGill
  • c19 US print culture if approached not from author/text side but from production/circulation perspective, antebellum American print culture was suffused with British literature
  • int'l copyright treaty not passed til 1890
  • how poetry thrives in early mass culture (1820-60) -- Harper up to Civil War -- newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, etc. Harper is paradigmatic of this
  • What if Harper were the paradigmatic epistemological frame: poets like Whittier, Emerson printing in newspapers and circulating with British lit too
  • not thinking about her lyrics as isolated lyrics but as responses to abolitionist work ("to Charles Sumner" responding in real time)
  • Harper always thinking about multiple audiences -- studying her poetry helps you see that in her prose
  • authors troping on authors in national traditions, but in the print market place they jostle with each other. We need to see how these conversations are going and a print culture perspective can facilitate that
  • example: Boston printer JB Errington [? Yearington? missed name] who printed/published canonical AfAm 1850s texts: Sojourner Truth, Brown's play, Harper's poems. His son is also Emerson's favorite shorthand reporter, one link between what we perceive as different canons, who occupy same cultural sites.
  • "sisterhood of reforms"
  • Harper and Dickens both masters of different formats -- serialization, public performance, etc.
  • generic innovators in including wider readerships
  • not seeing CD not just as a novelist but as working across different modalities if we use Harper as our epistemological frame

• Starting from African American writers to get to why Dickens and Eliot matter. But also Harper herself: what she's interested in is what we're interested in. The fact that she's interested in Vic lit works to the benefit of Vic lit, the cultural capital has shifted. Teaching Bleak House with Bondswoman Narrative: the most important thing about BH is that it's a source, and that's an incredible reorientation
• Harper was never forgotten in Black memory, but is only recently being seen in white institutions
• Iola Leroy does everything: AfAm history, gender, class.
• Look at the poetry, too. She has a deceptively simple style. "Sketches of Southern Life": Aunt Chloe sequence as dramatic monologues, "Learning to Read" (spectacle of illiteracy covering for being a reader). "Moses" is a blank verse epic about a choice: having a choice and choosing solidarity (intertext with "Spanish Gypsy")
• AfAm readers' British poetry was Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, the Coleridge of "Aids to Reflection" not "Kubla Khan," Cowper, Edward Young, Hannah Moore. Not Pope. Shakespeare and Milton always there. Eliot "Spanish Gypsy" but not Deronda, even though that's about race in that it's Jews as race. Deronda rewriting Spanish Gypsy in that it's a story about racial identification and embracement.
• AfAm readers also reading European literature extensively. Goethe, Petrarch in friendship albums. Newspapers were full of translated German ballads in America and Britain.