These two recent studies of nineteenth-century African American literature enter thorny territory at the outset. As Charles Lewis outlines in relation to Nella Larsen, whose career effectively ended in 1930 due to a charge of plagiarism, the issues of literary originality and authorial ownership

In other words, to foreground African American “transformations” of the work of Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (as Daniel Hack does) or to uncover the extent of plagiarism undertaken by the author of the first African American novel, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853) (as Geoffrey Sanborn does), is to risk reinforcing views of early African American literature as inevitably imitative, derivative and unoriginal. As Hack puts it, “It is no surprise that efforts to establish the legitimacy and value of a particular body of writing – to establish its status as literature, and as a literature – would shy away from apparent evidence of indebtedness” (6). Nonetheless, both of these scholars confront fearlessly the range of appropriations, borrowings, citational practices and, yes, plagiarisms contained in nineteenth-century African American literature and, in so doing, expand the interpretive tools heretofore available to scholars interested, broadly, in the intertextuality of African American literature – most particularly Henry Louis Gates's model of “signifyin(g)” which, as Hack notes, is limited by its emphasis on how African American writers “revise tropes from substantive antecedent texts in the African American tradition” (Gates quoted in Hack 6).

Of the two works, Sanborn's is the more provocative. How are we to read productively the first African American novelist if repeated instances of plagiarism cannot be proven to be in the service of some larger political point? As Sanborn phrases the question, “What can we do, as critics, when we cannot safely attribute to the author in question either aesthetic power or politically subversive intent?” (114). The answer he provides in this book is, “We can read the Brown that we have, not the Brown that we would be most comfortable having” (114). In the opening chapter, Sanborn identifies the magnitude of Brown's plagiarism, from both black and white authors, and discusses the ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding the practice. In particular, he considers Paul K. Saint-Amour's “readerly hedonics” that “countenance[s] plagiarism for the sake of pleasure” (quoted in Sanborn 19) as a model for reading Brown, who experiences “a mostly unspoken pleasure in the blurrability of texts and styles, a delight in the deauthenticating mobility of everything that it is possible to write or say” (25).Footnote ² While Sanborn acknowledges that plagiarism for pleasure cannot explain all instances of plagiarism in Brown's work – also at stake is “an effort to lay claim to the cultural authority that pithiness and wide-ranging knowledge signify” (25) – he professes to admire, in particular, the “chutzpah” of Brown's plagiarism of Washington Irving's essay on plagiarism in The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819) (28).

However, Sanborn is not exclusively interested in cataloguing instances of plagiarism in Brown; rather he uses it as a “starting point” (9) to investigate what Brown's plagiarism means for the writer's aesthetic and, more broadly, what Brown's approach to his work (and that of others) might reveal about early African American literature, the study of which has, for so long, relied on the image of “a man or woman forced by Necessity to write with a Purpose” (5). What might it mean to consider the “more-than-necessary and other-than-purposive aspects of early African American literature” (5)? To this end, the chapters that follow examine Brown's various appropriations of “anecdotes from white popular culture” (9) in chapter 2; of the aesthetics of mid-nineteenth-century forms of popular entertainment in chapter 3; of the white-looking “beautiful slave girl” in chapter 4; and of “the structure, as opposed to the content, of other writers’ sentences” in chapter 5 (119).

Chapter 2 focusses on “the appropriation of anecdotes from white popular culture” in the name of “fun.” Because many of these anecdotes are underwritten by “a cringeworthy minstrel-show humor” of the “Sambo” variety, critics have “tended to keep their distance” from this aspect of Brown's work (9). However, Sanborn argues, “Although fun can be a crude instrument of exclusion and denigration, it can also be a lightly invested mode of sociability, a fiction-friendly form of experience in which a range of different subjects can participate” (58). In chapter 3, Sanborn borrows the term “aesthetic of attractions” from Tom Gunning's study of early cinema to conceptualize Brown's interruption of narrative progress with diversions of various kinds – gags, song and/or dance numbers – that echo the kinds of diversion prevalent in forms of mass entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century and beyond (minstrel shows, exhibitions, panoramas, bazaars). Plagiarized passages play a central role in such narrative interruptions. Brown uses them “not only to change up the discursive mode but also to slow down the forward movement of the narrative” (77); such passages “break up the narrative in flamboyantly exhibitionistic ways” (77). Sanborn thus sees Brown's Clotel as participating in “the mid-nineteenth-century expansion of consumerist space and the emergence of cinematic time” (83). As such, it is less “a vehicle for abolitionist discourse” than a “vehicle of attractions, abolitionist and otherwise” (81).

In chapter 4, Sanborn discusses the numerous appearances of the white-looking “beautiful slave girl” – as both embodiment and projected victim of the widespread rape of slave women by white men – in Brown's work. Unlike Frederick Douglass and Solomon Northrop, to give the two examples that Sanborn cites, who devote substantial narrative space to graphic descriptions of the torture of black slave women, Brown's “beautiful slave girl” scenarios “simultaneously evok[e] and scree[n] out a scene of rape” (101). In his “various stagings of the figure of the beautiful slave girl,” the emphasis is not “on the world of slavery, the world from which she comes or toward which she goes, but on a mercifully no-where tending chain of signifiers” (103). In other words, while the scenario inevitably evokes rape, Brown always stops short of representing this outcome: “Slavery presented itself as a done deal. Brown presents slavery as a deal that is not yet done” (11). Chapter 5, which is also effectively the book's conclusion, considers an alternative model of authorship embodied by Brown in which “literary creativity” is, in the final analysis, “nonindividual” (123). Unlike in a model of authorship that “offers nothing but a monotonously ‘original’ self-aggrandizement,” Brown “shares the stage with others” (127).

Sanborn's work has major implications for at least two strands of contemporary literary studies. For those scholars working in the humanities who are sceptical of the digital “turn,” Sanborn's book demonstrates the meaningful ways in which literary studies more traditionally conceived can benefit from the practices of distant reading advocated by Franco Moretti and others. Through his exploration of “various online databases,” Sanborn uncovered the extent of Brown's plagiarism: over the course of his career, he plagiarized at least 87,000 words from at least 282 texts (8). (Detailed information and a bibliography of plagiarized works are provided in appendices at the end of the book.) As Sanborn observes, similar methodologies employed by future scholars “may reveal that a great many writers used published texts in similar ways” (17). Second, Sanborn's convincing delineation of Brown's interest in “fun,” narrative diversions and extravagant theatricality challenges the “Necessity to write with a Purpose” approaches to early African American literature (5). To be sure, Brown's strategies left him “vulnerable to a wide range of moral, socioeconomic, cultural, and aesthetic critiques” (64), but Sanborn's fascinating book demonstrates the value of reading Brown “not in spite of but by way of his plagiaristic extravaganzas” (124).

Hack's Reaping Something New confronts questions similar to those foregrounded in Plagiarama. He observes that existing models for interpreting African American citational practices would have us read them either as acts of “subversive appropriation” or as “politically symbolic acts of cultural positioning” (8). One reason such models are inadequate, according to Hack, is because they assume the canonicity of the prior text at the moment that citation occurs. An African American writer who alludes to Bleak House in 1854, while it is still being serialized in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, troubles both of these interpretive paradigms. Instead, Hack emphasizes the heterogeneity of African American writers’ transformations of Victorian literature, noting that the Victorian text often facilitated an African American writer's citation of another African American writer's work (12). For example, in chapter 5, he argues that Pauline E. Hopkins's allusions to the work of Tennyson and Edward Bulwer Lytton function as a kind of bridge allowing her to enter into a critical dialogue with fellow African American writer Charles Chesnutt, who also cited these writers. In Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars (1900), Lytton is enlisted to endorse the mixed-race male protagonist's decision to live as white. By contrast, in Of One Blood (1902–3), Hopkins revises Chesnutt by citing Lytton in a novel in which the mixed-race protagonist “assumes the full privilege and responsibility of his matrilineal blackness” (172). In chapter 6, Hack nuances existing scholarly discussions of W. E. B. Du Bois's practice of including dual epigraphs (one from British poetry, one from a “sorrow song”) at the beginning of each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) by observing that when Du Bois quotes lines from, say, Lord Byron, he is citing every prior citation of Byron in African American literature up to that moment (182). Impressive as he is on the heterogeneity of African American writers’ repurposing of Victorian texts, Hack is ultimately more committed than Sanborn is to the idea that African American borrowings from Victorian texts “constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression” (2).

The book is structured in two parts: the first three chapters focus on particular Victorian texts (by Dickens, Tennyson and Eliot), allusions to which surface and resurface in multiple African American works of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the second three chapters take a particular African American writer (Chesnutt, Hopkins, Du Bois) and map his or her respective engagements with a range of Victorian writers including, but not limited to, those who dominate the first half of the book. In the first two chapters, Hack is especially interested in the reprinting of Dickens's Bleak House (1852–53) and Tennyson's “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) in Frederick Douglass’ Paper and the extent to which these works were reframed in innovative and sometimes surprising ways for African American readers of that periodical. For example, the satirical representation of Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House – whose commitment to what Dickens famously called “telescopic philanthropy” in Africa rather than local (British) injustices – was roundly criticized by the British abolitionist Lord Denman. By this logic, it would follow that African American readers might object even more strongly to the satirizing of a woman whose efforts on behalf of “the Brotherhood of Humanity” lead her to neglect her duties as wife and mother (26). Instead, several works appeared in Frederick Douglass’ Paper that repurposed the novel's valorization of localism. One article cited Bleak House to critique the outrage expressed at the incarceration of a Protestant missionary in Florence while the imprisonment of a woman in Virginia for teaching slaves to read “is taken quite calmly” (32). Here, then, “The form of Dickens's criticism is maintained, but its content is virtually reversed” (32).

Hack is particularly effective when demonstrating that the practices employed by African American writers “make us see differently Victorian literature's treatment of race, and reveal how intimately the treatment of race is bound up with other, ostensibly unrelated aspects of an author's work” (14). For instance, when Tennyson's “Charge of the Light Brigade” was published in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, a column on the preceding page by James McCune Smith claimed that the narrative poem was a Congolese chant, first used to call slaves to rebel in Saint Domingo, that has been plagiarized by Tennyson (51)! Smith's accusation that Tennyson's poem was plagiarized from a Haitian rebel chant takes on greater resonance when considered in relation to an earlier Tennyson poem, “Anacaona” (1830), which treats of the so-called “Queen of Haiti.” By extension, Hack encourages us to pay attention to connections between the exoticizing impulse evident in “Anacaona” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” When “brought into contact with these other poems … the Crimea becomes visible as another such seductively exotic locale” (64). In other words, the “deracializing decontextulization” (79) enacted by “The Charge of the Light Brigade” is uncovered through Smith's reading of Tennyson's poem. As Hack reminds us, “Citation is by definition an act of recontextualization” (11).

One of the most compelling chapters is that focussed on Chesnutt's work. Identifying throwaway remarks in Dickens's David Copperfield (1849–50) and Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) in which, respectively, David and Maggie Tulliver are likened to mulatto/as, Hack argues that Chesnutt's The House behind the Cedars rewrites “Victorian literature's mulatto moments” through its representation of mixed-race brother and sister John and Rena Walden (119). In addition, he notes that the appearance of a character called Blanche in The House behind the Cedars, and two characters called Blanche and Bertha in his posthumously published novel The Quarry (1999), signal Chesnutt's interest in “the most famous (possible) mulatta in Victorian literature” (134): Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason. By placing the mulatto/a centre stage in his work, “Chesnutt does not just criticize and correct for the marginalization and instrumentalization of mulattoes in Victorian fiction”; he also “uses the mulatto to undermine the very purpose it serves in that fiction, whether casually or concertedly: to reinforce what Irene Tucker calls ‘the logic of racial self-evidence’” (128).

Hack's least persuasive chapter is that concerned with the reverberations of a little-studied George Eliot narrative poem, The Spanish Gypsy (1868), in African American texts that treat of “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation,” beginning with Frances E. W. Harper's work of the 1890s (80). Hack himself acknowledges that, by the time Marie Louise Burgess-Ware's “Bernice, The Octoroon” appeared in the Colored American Magazine in 1903, “enough stories of unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation had been published that the connection to Eliot's poem may seem attenuated at best” (88). It seems more likely that, when writing The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot was herself influenced by examples of unwitting passing from earlier US writing. As Hack notes, Eliot corresponded with two purveyors of such narratives, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child, whose character George Elliot from “The Quadroons” (1842) may even, Hack speculates, have inspired Mary Anne Evans's pseudonym (100). Furthermore, another tale of unwitting passing, Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1859), was staged in London in 1861 and was widely covered in the press.

Sanborn's and Hack's books speak to each other most obviously in their discussions of Pauline E. Hopkins (1859–1930), a literary disciple of Brown's, who plagiarized not only from Brown, but also from innumerable other sources. Sanborn discusses Hopkins's Of One Blood (1902–3), of which approximately 18 percent is copied without attribution. (Hack cites and engages with the article-length version of this section of Sanborn's book (164).) Hopkins's appropriative practices have attracted quite a lot of recent scholarly attention: at the 2016 American Literature Association conference, an entire panel was devoted to “‘Inspired Borrowings’ or Plagiarism? The Significance of Pauline Hopkins's Textual Appropriations.” In her paper given as part of that panel, JoAnn Pavletich demonstrated that Hopkins appropriated material from about fifteen sources in Winona (1902). Hack is more circumspect with his language than Sanborn is when describing Hopkins's plagiarism, which Hack frames as “unacknowledged borrowing from other texts” (137) or her “intertextual and appropriative relationship to Victorian literature” (139). When he does use the word “plagiarism,” he qualifies, “(or something closely akin to it)” (163). Still, Hack makes a strong case for reading Hopkins's (many) allusions to Tennyson in Contending Forces (1901) as a vehicle for her to smuggle queer desires into works that, ostensibly, conclude with heterosexual marriage and respectability.

One aspect of Hack's study that was particularly illuminating, for this reader at least, was the revelation of the extent to which Tennyson looms large in early African American literature. From Anna Julia Cooper to W. E. B. Du Bois, from Charles Chesnutt to Pauline E. Hopkins, from James McCune Smith to Alexander Crummell: a dizzying array of African American writers alluded to, quoted, incorporated and repurposed innumerable Tennyson works. This is particularly suggestive given Tennyson's own battles in his lifetime with accusations of unoriginality, appropriation and imitation (161). In a brief discussion of Tennyson's defence of his writing in the light of John Churton Collins's critique of the poet's “assimilative skill,” Hack identifies Tennyson's “effort to preserve the originality [of his own work] by dissociating it from a model of uniqueness that has proved untenable” (162). One of the many achievements of Hack's and Sanborn's studies is that they provoke readers to think in complex, nuanced ways about precisely these questions. What constitutes “uniqueness” or “originality” in nineteenth-century African American literature? And why does it matter? Or does it even matter? By posing such questions, and by providing such rich responses to them, these two works greatly advance our understanding of nineteenth-century African American literature.