Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.
An interesting rereading of familiar texts by Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot recovering the historical and literary roots of the supernatural as it appears in each women's work. Dickerson (English, Rhodes College) makes interesting observations about women's changing roles in the 19th century when scientific advancements relegated women to the home as arbiters of the spiritual while men occupied themselves with "rational" invention. Through close readings, she demonstrates how the Brontes, Gaskell, and Eliot resisted this division and, simultaneously, created a spiritual genre of writing traditionally denigrated by critics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
An interesting rereading of familiar texts by Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot recovering the historical and literary roots of the supernatural as it appears in each women's work. Dickerson (English, Rhodes College) makes interesting observations about women's changing roles in the 19th century when scientific advancements relegated women to the home as arbiters of the spiritual while men occupied themselves with "rational" invention. Through close readings, she demonstrates how the Brontes, Gaskell, and Eliot resisted this division and, simultaneously, created a spiritual genre of writing traditionally denigrated by critics. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Dark Victorians illuminates the cross-cultural influences between white Britons and black Americans during the Victorian age. In carefully analyzing literature and travel narratives by Ida B. Wells, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Carlyle, W.E.B. Du Bois, and others, Vanessa D. Dickerson reveals the profound political, racial, and rhetorical exchanges between the groups. From the nineteenth-century black nationalist David Walker, who urged emigrating African Americans to turn to England, to the twentieth-century writer Maya Angelou, who recalls how those she knew in her childhood aspired to Victorian ideas of conduct, black Americans have consistently embraced Victorian England. At a time when scholars of black studies are exploring the relations between diasporic blacks, and postcolonialists are taking imperialism to task, Dickerson considers how Britons negotiated their support of African Americans with the controlling policies they used to govern a growing empire of often dark-skinned peoples, and how philanthropic and abolitionist Victorian discourses influenced black identity, prejudice, and racism in America.
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