Daniel Hack’s new book is a story about prepositions. Tracking African American writers’ and editors’ engagements with Victorian literature from the middle of the nineteenth century through the first decade of the twentieth, Hack painstakingly demonstrates their variability and multidirectionality. Anna Julia Cooper does work “on and with” Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) in her own A Voice from the South (1892; 11); later authors, editors, and intellectuals “build on and respond to prior African Americanizations” of individual works (33), as when Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53) is reprinted in Frederick Douglass’ Paper and rewritten in Hannah Craft’s Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1853–61); Frances E. W. Harper, meanwhile, thematizes questions of social stigma and ethnic affiliation through tropes that she and other writers “extract from and associate with” George Eliot’s narrative poem The Spanish Gypsy (1868; 85); and Charles Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars (1900) extends the tradition of the British novel—exemplified by Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (1860) and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891)—while working “athwart or against it” (126).Reaping Something New is, in this sense, also fundamentally a story about influence and intertextuality, though it remains wary of both terms. Hack’s attempt to “recover” African American responses to Victorian literature that, as he shows, “constituted a deliberate political strategy and means of artistic expression” (2) deviates alike from the patricidal melodrama of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (1973) and the sentimental gratitude of Christopher Ricks’s Allusion to the Poets (2002)—a “polar opposition” that, Peter Erickson (2007: 2) suggests, produces a “methodological double bind” in studies of influence and intertextuality writ large. Hack finds African American “transpositions and repurposings” (1) of a near-contemporary corpus of British literature to be thoroughly complex, multivalent, and heterogeneous and not simply acts of subversive appropriation or demonstrations of cultural literacy. And through these citational practices Hack glimpses both African American and Victorian literature anew.That this purposeful “decontextualization” and “recontextualization” (66) of Victorian texts might be shaded by imitation, indebtedness, irony, or indeed appropriation explains Hack’s hesitation to embrace a catchall conceptual apparatus like intertextuality. He disavows that term precisely because “focus[ing] on the reception and reworkings of a particular literary work runs the risk of insinuating a categorical if not ontological distinction between that work and those reworkings” (42). Hack, rather, aims to “[take] seriously the intertextual nature of all literary works” and “[call] into question the very hierarchy that grants ontological or aesthetic priority to the chronologically prior” (42), though he remains crucially aware of intertextuality’s significant place in African American literary theory and criticism.Reaping Something New thereby joins recent work complicating, while acknowledging its debts to, theories of the black literary tradition articulated most famously by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Signifying Monkey. Gates sought to illuminate how African American writers repeat and revise each other’s texts, forming chains of signification that cumulatively produce a self-sufficient and internally coherent tradition; Hack reveals that the repetition and revision of Victorian texts constitutes its own tradition—indeed, a tradition within a tradition. This departure from the Gatesian model is most explicit when Hack notes that the epigraph from Cooper’s Voice from the South in Gates’s foreword to the forty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers excises the lines of Tennyson that Cooper quotes. Here Hack is right to suggest that such editorial sleight of hand implies an unwillingness to recognize how particular traditions develop—historically and aesthetically—in dynamic relation to other bodies of writing. This insight remains among the book’s most profound: the distinctiveness and coherence of the African American literary tradition need not be predicated solely on that tradition’s detachment or isolation from other literatures; rather, it may profitably draw on associations with other canons and traditions.This argument may not, however, be as far left of Gates as Hack might like. In his introduction to The Signifying Monkey, for example, Gates (1988: xxiii) remarks: Naming the black tradition’s own theory of itself is to echo and rename other theories of literary criticism. Our task is not to reinvent our traditions as if they bore no relation to that tradition created and borne, in the main, by white men. Our writers used that impressive tradition to define themselves, both with and against their concept of received order. We must do the same, with or against the Western critical canon. To name our tradition is to rename each of its antecedents, no matter how pale they might seem.Another major takeaway from Reaping Something New does, though, complicate precisely what Gates might mean by “that tradition created and borne . . . by white men.” Since nineteenth-century British literature had not achieved the canonical status of its Enlightenment, Renaissance, or classical predecessors, Hack argues, African American writers positioned themselves in a field of literary production contemporary with or nearly contemporary with the Victorians they engaged, rather than hark back to a codified Western canon.Hack’s recovery of this subtradition of black Victorianist repetition and revision is most exciting precisely when it highlights allusions to and citations of previous “African Americanizations.” This phenomenon reaches fever pitch in the chapter focusing on postbellum/pre-Harlem writer Pauline Hopkins. Hack writes that Hopkins alludes to Tennyson’s “Dream of Fair Women” in her novel Contending Forces (1900) largely because Chesnutt refers to the same poem in his story “The Wife of His Youth” (published first in the Atlantic Monthly in 1898 and then in an eponymous collection in 1899). Hack similarly argues that Hopkins’s novel Of One Blood (1903) turns to the less-known Edward Bulwer-Lytton primarily because that author appears in Chesnutt’s House behind the Cedars. Elsewhere Hopkins’s use of In Memoriam recalls Cooper’s similar move a decade earlier. Complicating matters even further, the jarring use of a terminal epigraph in Contending Forces—a “novel-ending quotation . . . so rare that we do not have a standard name for it” (142)—creates a proliferation of textual connections. Hopkins’s epigraph from Tennyson’s Princess: A Medley (1847) suggests an affiliation with Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), which itself ends with a stanza from another poem by Harper, as well as with Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), which concludes with an excerpt from John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671). Through this surprising formal choice Hopkins constructs an intertextual triangulation as Victorian as it is African American. Hack later links Hopkins’s Tennysonian citation to Tennyson’s own practices of textual borrowing and acknowledged self-quotation. Such “African Americanization” thus repeats and revises an intrinsically Victorian practice.In these instances—notable also in the final chapter, on W. E. B. Du Bois—Hack’s attention to the “granularity” of African American writers’ specific and strategic Victorianisms (4) vivifies a set of formal choices otherwise flattened by critical convention. For example, he notes that the extent of Hopkins’s citation, borrowing, and putative “plagiarism” tends to “constrict the range of ways Hopkins can be seen as working on or with her sources” (164). Similarly, critics have spilled plenty of ink on the epigraphs in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), but all too frequently only in support of broad generalizations rather than in close scrutiny of Du Bois’s selection of authors, texts, and passages. The discussion of Du Bois is especially interesting—fun, even—when Hack describes Du Bois’s citation of Byron in the third chapter of Souls as a “meta-epigraph” (182), referring to previous related quotations by Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Henry Highland Garnet, and Martin Delany. And more: Du Bois not only repeats and revises previous “African Americanizations” by other writers and intellectuals but also repeats and revises his own earlier citational practices. Du Bois’s lecture “The Vision of Phillis the Blessed” (1941), delivered at Fisk University’s seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration, begins with an epigraph from Dante Gabriel Rossetti that Hack calls a performance of “auto-meta-intertextuality” (196)!This is the broader methodological provocation of Reaping Something New. Shifting between various scales of analysis—from a work’s production, circulation, and reception to formal choices on the level of “diction, phrasing, dialogue, description, characterization, and plot”—constitutes what Hack calls “close reading at a distance” (2, 3). This method “combines detailed, granular textual analysis with consideration of a work’s geographical dispersal and uptake, especially by readerships not envisioned or addressed by the work itself” (3). Interestingly enough, Rebecca L. Walkowitz employs the same phrase to describe her method in Born Translated. For Walkowitz (2015: 83), “close reading at a distance” signifies a practice that “challenges the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic properties of the work, draws our attention to the role of global audiences in the production of literary fiction, and asks us to consider how literature written for the world establishes new paradigms of uniqueness.” Appraising Hack’s work on “African Americanizations” of Bleak House (first published in Hack 2008), Walkowitz finds this method more like “distant reading up close”: it tracks “how an original text with ‘intrinsic features’ travels from one political context to another, and how it is deployed in each of those contexts” (87). In both cases, I remain unconvinced that the analytic protocols and procedures on display merit new coinages. This tendency—indeed, pressure—to demarcate novel critical modes seems, more than anything, a by-product of an intellectual and academic climate shaped by the so-called reading wars in literary studies. Such semantic handwringing may not age well as new critical and theoretical problems come into vogue. But whether we should call Reaping Something New “close reading at a distance” or “distant reading up close” is no matter; let us just call it what it is—literary history at its best.Nicholas T Rinehart is a doctoral candidate in English at Harvard University. His research has appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of Social History, MELUS, ReVista, and Transition. He is also an editor, with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017).