Nineteenth-century Narratives Research Articles

The Carrigan Manuscripts: the Fitzpatricks of Raheen and Kilcready, Co. Kilkenny

Among Carrigan’s Manuscripts are his notes on several Fitzpatrick families of Co. Laois and Co. Kilkenny, who are not clearly connected with the Barons of Upper Ossory, that provide sixteenth to nineteenth century narratives and genealogies mostly unavailable elsewhere. In Volume 47 of the Carrigan Manuscripts, entitled, ‘Mainly West Kilkenny County’, are records of Fitzpatricks of Monachunna (Móin an Chonnaidh) and Kilcready , as well as those of other connected families, such as Aylward, Barron, Daton, and Forestall.

Byzantine Translations from Arabic into Greek: Old and New Historiography in Confluence and in Conflict

Scholarly demand to re-evaluate underappreciated cultures has grown since the 1980s. This generated a call to re-write the nineteenth-century narrative on the transmission of knowledge from the ancient Near East to the Graeco-Roman, Islamic, Western medieval, and early modern European world. The paper surveys the modern study of Byzantine translations from Arabic into Greek in order to propose a new narrative frame, no longer linear but attentive to continuous and bi-directional contact between medieval civilisations. The paper offers the contact between Byzantium and various parts of the Islamic world as an example. It discusses the presumed insularity of Byzantine literary culture and its relationship with ancient Greek literary heritage. Problems of dating, localising, and socially contextualising the translations (through information on their authors and patrons) are also examined.

“Our Reporter Is Just Come From The Ruins”: Reporting Practices and the 1860 Pemberton Mill Disaster

The largest industrial disaster ever to have occurred on American soil at the time, the gruesome January 10, 1860, collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, provides an opportunity to study early breaking news reporting in the nineteenth century narrative and illustrated press. Using newspapers at the local, regional, and national level, the study examines reporting strategies, story structures, and the journalistic standards undergirding this content. This research finds that by 1860 newspapers had adopted a scope of reporting strategies and editorial practices that fulfilled complex, evolving roles for the press. It also reveals that, despite the scope and sensational nature of the calamity, the story quickly transitioned from news, to myth, to forgotten in national memory.

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Lindsay A. Silver Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. America in the Nineteenth Century. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. x, 284. $39.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-5339-9.) In Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States, Erin Austin Dwyer insightfully demonstrates how emotions shaped, maintained, and challenged the institution of slavery by examining the power dynamics of real and performative feelings between people who were enslaved and slave owners. At the same time, Dwyer emphasizes the prominence of emotions in proslavery defenses and abolitionist critiques, further underscoring the centrality of sentiments to many of the arguments seeking to uphold or destroy slavery in antebellum America. As a book about the power of emotions and feelings, Mastering Emotions primarily focuses on relationships between enslaved people and slaveholders. Dwyer draws on a wide variety of sources while making particular use of first-person accounts. These sources, which include slave narratives alongside the journals and diaries of white southerners who owned enslaved people, enable Dwyer to expose and explore the feelings and emotions that established, maintained, and even challenged the power dynamics within slavery. Dwyer’s work is deeply rooted in an extensive historiography of American slavery that acknowledges the prevalence of such sentiments among enslaved Blacks and slaveholding whites. What stands out about Mastering Emotions is that Dwyer is the first to seriously and methodically analyze the significance of feelings and emotions to the institution of slavery. Dwyer accomplishes this goal by applying the framework established by scholars of the history of emotions to the history of American slavery. As a result, the reader revisits many familiar scenes and stories from nineteenth-century narratives of enslaved people and slaveholders, but with a new understanding of how power dynamics operated between them, due to Dwyer’s emphasis on the importance of emotions in these relationships. Mastering Emotions covers considerable ground, examining a number of emotions from multiple angles and perspectives. Dwyer successfully demonstrates how the roles of enslaved persons and slave owners were culturally constructed, learned, reinforced, and challenged through emotions both real and performative. Included in the wide range of emotions Dwyer examines are trust, happiness, fear, and the enjoyment of freedom. In her discussion of fear and punishment, the author highlights how scholars have traditionally focused on physical punishment inflicted on enslaved people and have ignored or downplayed the role of emotional or affective discipline. By shifting the focus away from physical punishment and examining the role of emotions, Dwyer successfully demonstrates a greater understanding of “the lived experience of slavery and . . . the critical place of emotional mastery in discipline” (p. 139). Additionally, Dwyer exposes the contradictions in proslavery literature that argued that enslaved people did not have the capacity to feel emotions as strongly as white people, even as emotional punishments designed to break up enslaved families became a common form of control—one that enslaved people often felt was much more painful than physical violence. [End Page 142] In order to fully demonstrate the significance, power, and legacy of the emotional politics of slavery, Dwyer concludes with a brief but important overview of how emotions have shaped Black and white race relations in America since emancipation. In doing so, Dwyer outlines how different emotions, particularly fear, have tragically impacted the joys of freedom for Black Americans from the Jim Crow era to the present. Importantly, Dwyer’s conclusion makes a strong case for further academic and cultural work to better understand the power dynamics of emotions within race relations since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Lindsay A. Silver Texas A&M University–San Antonio Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Unhousing the Archives Around theZong, Again

Unhousing the Archives Around the<i>Zong</i>, Again

Spectacular remains: Black celebrity, death and the aesthetics of autopsy

ABSTRACT This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.

Islamism, Islamic Modernism and the Search for Modern Authenticity in an Imaginary Past

How to be authentically modern? This was the pervasive question behind the ideological elaborations of numerous religious and nationalist movements toward the end of the nineteenth century. Many of them attempted to find the answer in an imaginary past. This article claims that Islamist movements are not an exception, but rather an affirmation of this rule. The orientation towards a “golden age” of Islam and its allegedly authentic Islamic way of life has been a crucial feature of Islamist thought across all national, sectarian and ideological divides. The article traces this invocation of the past historically back to the construction of specifically Islamic forms of modernity by representatives of Islamic modernism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Interpreting their modernist thought in the context of more global nineteenth-century concepts and narratives, the article argues from a comparative perspective that Islamic modernism laid the foundations for the ways in which Islamist thinkers have constructed both individual and collective forms of Muslim identities.

Painted Portraits and Androgynous Apparitions in the Haunted-Portrait Narratives of Vernon Lee and E. Nesbit

ABSTRACT Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s dramatic monologue “The Portrait” (1870) begins with an elegiac lament from an artist, gazing upon a portrait of his dead beloved: “This is her image as she was:/It seems a thing to wonder on,/As though mine image in a glass/Should tarry when myself am gone.” 1 Rossetti’s verse not only preserves the image of a dead beloved in art, but presents the portrait as a mirror, timelessly preserving the artist’s reflection after he, too, has perished. Rossetti’s poem was one of many nineteenth-century narratives penned by male writers of Aestheticism and Decadence that utilized the preservation of a beautiful woman in portrait form to assuage the male artist’s fear of death. It is this paradox, of existing in art, as an image of both male fears and fantasies, beyond life itself, that this article seeks to explore. Through the examination of two haunted-portrait narratives penned by female writers, Vernon Lee’s “Amour Dure” (1890) and E. Nesbit’s “The Ebony Frame” (1893), the concept of the haunted portrait will be analysed as a seductive force, encapsulating a beautiful young woman residing at the seemingly paradoxical intersection of sexuality and death. In both texts spectral femmes fatales haunt and seduce nineteenth-century male writers for their own, perhaps malign, purposes, allowing for an examination as to how Lee and Nesbit “re-frame” male-authored representations of portraiture. In doing so, it will be discussed how Lee and Nesbit subtly utilize the ghost story to corrupt the prevailing, masculine aesthetic principles of Aestheticism and Decadence, recording the amoral beauty of the femme fatale, and recording the visual subordination of spectator to objet d’art.

Laura Olcelli, Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century

Laura Olcelli, Questions of Authority: Italian and Australian narratives of the Long Nineteenth Century

Un nouvel âge de l'enquête. Portraits de l'écrivain contemporain en enquêteur by Laurent Demanze

Reviewed by: Un nouvel âge de l'enquête. Portraits de l'écrivain contemporain en enquêteur by Laurent Demanze Carole Edwards Laurent Demanze. Un nouvel âge de l'enquête. Portraits de l'écrivain contemporain en enquêteur. Paris: Editions José Corti, coll. « les essais », 2019. 304 pp. Paper, €23.00. In The Experimental Novel (1893), Emile Zola coined the term "the investigation age" to describe how writers relate to the real world in multiple ways, not just one. In his essay divided into five chapters, Laurent Demanze demonstrates that, at the turn of the twenty-first century, writers faced a "new age of investigation," one marked by blurred parameters in "opaque" settings ranging from the social sciences to documentaries, from testimonies to factual knowledge.1 Thus, the contemporary writer navigates all border-crossing territories, engaging in "an inquisitorial paradigm" (as Dominique Kalifa styles it), and choosing a multifaceted approach to discourse, knowledge, and practices. Demanze differentiates the posture of the researcher from that of the author. He contends that, in this time of democratization of the Humanities and Social Sciences, while researchers follow a set of protocols often defined by a specific field or a given theoretical framework, authors have the freedom to observe all disciplines but also to steer away from them all, in a perfectly whimsical way, and to remain amateurs or simply unlabeled in their creativity. In this sense, Demanze claims that contemporary writers benefit from the "porous nature of the literary fields" as they become acculturated to keep their intellectual independence, one estranged from any outside influences. In a newly remodeled imaginary, authors choose to create an "undisciplined" space to reflect a reality of their choosing, a mimicry of the world but on their own terms. By distancing themselves from any movements or trends, they run the risk of being considered as impostors in a space where the scope of authorship is renegotiated. In this vein, L'enquête contemporaine (the contemporary investigation) acts as a "displacement of all objects and support for the inquisitorial paradigm" (20), a so-called documentary turn (Mark Nash2). Writers, he argues, are not necessarily politically tainted, even though their productions can resonate with human and social "depth" (25), thereby turning their literature into a polyphonous spokesperson for the people on the margins. Demanze illustrates his theory of this new age of investigation with a plethora of examples ranging from Emmanuel [End Page 136] Carrère to Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin and Jean Hatzfield. He contends that writers may take on multiple roles, becoming detectives, journalists, or ethnographers, without ever completely belonging to a single category, but rather cultivating this amateur status, one detached from any clearly defined scientific knowledge. A writer's sense of wonder launches the investigation (chapter 1), empowering him/her with the ability to think—and to defy—all existing borders. It deciphers singular experiences based on an epistemological defamiliarization of various discourses regrouped in a "common place" (un lieu commun, 43). Demanze relies both on Marcel Proust's nineteenth-century narratives and on detective novels to showcase how the contemporary writer leads the investigation in a playful way, challenging taxonomies by maintaining a suspenseful tension. Side stories are part of the narrative game so that enigmas only become revealed at the very end. This aesthetic challenge disorientates the reader whose task is to navigate between fiction and reality. The ambivalent position of the writer makes interpreting virtually impossible as it allies "an external alterity with an internal familiarity" (80). In the second chapter, Demanze envisions the writer as an explorer. Transformed into ethnographers, writers ought to go in situ to obtain the subject matter necessary to fuel their production. Demanze refers to George Perec to underscore how each writer invests in new spaces to offer a singular outlook mixing reality and fiction.3 Through immersion, writers "give life to a human document,"4 both reporting findings and creating fiction using nuanced voices that belong to other individuals from all social categories. These voices form a "literary journalism," one which collects singular encounters and combines facts with pure fabrication. Demanze then differentiates four types of narrators from subjective to objective, always illustrating his accounts...

Pericia universitaria de Galdós en su evocación y expediente académico

Con atención preferente a escritos autobiográficos y a su expediente académico, el presente artículo propone una mirada sobre la elección vocacional, formativa y, al cabo, profesional que lleva a Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920), en primer término, desde su Gran Canaria natal hasta el Madrid de las postrimerías isabelinas, en 1862, y, muy poco después, desde las aulas de la facultad de Derecho de la Universidad Central hasta el desempeño laboral en diversas redacciones periodísticas y, más todavía, hasta la cúspide de la narrativa decimonónica en lengua española. This article takes a look at the vocational, formative and professional choice that led Benito Pérez Galdós (1843-1920) first from his native Gran Canaria to the Madrid of the last Isabelline years, in 1862; shortly after this, he went from the classrooms of the Faculty of Law of the Central University to work in various newsrooms, and even reaching a the cusp of the nineteenth-century narrative in the Spanish language. The methodology pays preferential attention to the autobiographical writings and his academic record.

Captive Images: The Wars in Chechnya from Tolstoy to Khashchavatski’s Prisoners of the Caucasus

The article examines the use of documentary film as a tool of political intervention that enlists the resources of broadcast journalism and literature in the representation of war. Access to images is a determining factor in the shaping of public opinion and affects citizens’ political views about the waging of war. The private files of four freelance cameramen who provide footage for news agencies and television networks and covered the wars in Chechnya are the main sources for Yuri Khashchavatski’s documentary Prisoners of the Caucasus (2002). The film traces a connection between this contemporary representation of the war in the Caucasus and Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century narratives and denounces both how the war was conducted and the invisibility in the media of the suffering of civilian victims and regular soldiers. Connecting the stringers’ files to an earlier literary tradition is a way of claiming the political dimension of memory, a political exercise at the crossroads between the media and the arts.

A configuração da personagem feminina em 'A Rainha do Ignoto', de Emília Freitas, e em 'El Pais de las mujeres', de Gioconda Belli

No século XIX, a sociedade concebia a atividade artística como uma qualidade especificamente masculina, logo, as mulheres deveriam se conformar com as suas imagens moldadas pelos homens. Contudo, sabe-se que algumas mulheres conseguiram superar essa imposição e não somente produziram textos literários como trataram das experiências femininas sob suas perspectivas. Por meio da criação literária, conseguiram revisar e reconstruir a configuração das personagens femininas, ainda que de forma dissimulada. É o caso de Emília Freitas (1855-1908) em sua obra fantástico-maravilhosa A Rainha do Ignoto (1899). Nela, a escritora subverte a concepção de mulher na narrativa oitocentista, no Brasil, por meio do recurso sobrenatural. Da mesma forma que a escritora brasileira, Gioconda Belli revisa a configuração da personagem feminina no século XXI. Em El pais de las mujeres (2010), a escritora revê o estereótipo feminino de mãe, esposa e cuidadora do lar como forma de quebrar o paradigma construído negativamente entorno desses aspectos. Essas escritoras foram fundamentais para a transformação da literatura de autoria feminina, haja vista que a tomada de consciência de se papel mudou a figuração da personagem feminina na ficção. Este trabalho toma como base os autores Gilbert e Gubar (1998), Bourdieu (2012), Verona (2013), dentre outros.

“We’ll Cook Him Up in a Stew”: Stepmothers and Primogeniture in the Brothers Grimm’s The Juniper Tree

What larger social concern could the continued popularity of the nineteenth-century cannibal stepmother narrative in twenty-first century crime and news reporting be indicating? In this paper, I compare a fictional episode of cannibalism in the non-canonical Brothers Grimms’ tale, “The Juniper Tree,” with the true story of the 2010 murder and subsequent dismemberment of Zahra Baker in Hickory, North Carolina to consider the larger cultural implications of cannibalistic stepmothers. In doing so I argue that, despite the half-hearted attempt by mainstream animation studios to try to create semi-Feminist adaptations of the canonical fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Charles Perrault, narratives similar to “The Juniper Tree” in fact reinforce a pro-male model of inheritance at the sacrifice of both wives and their girl children. These adaptations also communicate modern social anxieties surrounding blended families, especially regarding heteronormative visions of childhood, savior narratives around adoption, and easy answers about inheritance. Faculty Sponsor: Elizabeth E. Tavares

"바다에서의 정체성 실험: 19세기 영국 항해서사 최근 연구동향"

"바다에서의 정체성 실험: 19세기 영국 항해서사 최근 연구동향"

The BBC Eastern Service and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism

In the 1940s, the BBC Imperial Service was a fertile place of interaction for writers from South Asia, as it was for those from British colonies in Africa and the West Indies. Leftist, Marxist, and anti-imperialist intellectuals from around the world converged in London, and radio was one of several media by which they discussed fascism, democracy, and aesthetics. Cosmopolitanism was the preferred vision of empire articulated by the BBC’s Eastern Service broadcasts to South Asia, marking a shift from nineteenth-century narratives about empire celebrating military conquest. It was the discourse of propaganda in the war years and acted as a counter-discourse to fascism and anti-imperial movements. The characterization of the BBC Imperial service as a cosmopolitan space in its own discourse, in contemporary criticism, and in discussions of the medium neglects the reality that the BBC broadcasts to South Asia were conceptually narrow in order to disseminate the vision of an open, pluralistic imperial centre and to erase realities of famine, oppression, and anti-imperial activity in the Raj.

Transported Identities: Global Trafficking and Late-Imperial Subjectivity in Cuban Narratives on African Penal Colonies

AbstractThis article studies the reformulation of Black Legend, Middle Passage andconvivenciadiscourses in nineteenth-century narratives published by Cubans sent to Spain's de facto penal colony on Fernando Po. Contextualised with archival sources, this reading highlights how deportees condemned Spain's perpetuation of the slave trade while struggling to negotiate their own positioning within the racially-stratified practices of late-imperial space. Those negotiations often exacerbated traditional divisions between different communities within the Spanish colonial system. In some instances, however, the deportees’ encounters with citizens and colonised subjects from distant territories may have bolstered and expanded intra-imperial identification and solidarity.

American Sympathizers: Confessing Illicit Feeling from the Civil War to the Vietnam War

Portraits of sympathizers recur across American literature, from nineteenth-century narratives by Edward Everett Hale Jr., Loreta Velazquez, and Walt Whitman to Viet Thanh Nguyen's twenty-first-century novel. Together, their texts elucidate why this understudied trope remains provocative. Whereas nineteenth-century literature often imagines how sympathy fosters national cohesion, feeling for the enemy threatens such stability and prompts government efforts to regulate sentiment. Sympathizers may perform loyalty to claim the authority associated with white masculinity. Yet they also gain power by confessing to criminal sentiments. This figure thus embodies fantasies of rebellion, fears of national dissolution, and the state's affective power.

Reading the Mesh of Metonymy in Bleak House

Reading the Mesh of Metonymy in Bleak House Michael Lesiuk (bio) In this article, I would like to combine an analysis of Charles Dickens's use of metonymy in Bleak House (1852–1853) with some concepts from cognitive linguistics and ecocritical studies in order to explore how the abundance of metonymic connection and deferral in the novel figures the complexities of connection and interdependence in the Victorian urban world—or what ecocritic Timothy Morton calls the mesh, a term that denotes the complex interconnectedness of all living and nonliving beings. I argue that Dickens uses metonymy to figure the strange, unsettling aspects of existence within the mesh and that what seems like an unjustified use of the figure by the third-person narrator at the novel's opening is justified as the narrative unfolds and as the novel's other narrator, Esther, explores the city and traces the implied connections and metonymic associations proposed in the novel's opening. In this way, I hope to show how a long narrative may use metonymy to reveal or create new knowledge. In Bleak House this new knowledge is about the depth of interconnection and interdependence in the urban world and the troubling implications of this interconnection. The novel shows how entities in the urban world cannot be fully understood or defined in themselves; rather, they must be understood in relation to other entities, life forms, or beings—that is, metonymically. [End Page 121] I will begin by discussing common approaches to looking at metonymy in nineteenth-century narrative and the difficulties that lie therein. I would then like to look at the excessive use of metonymy in the novel's opening chapter, in which the third-person narrator presents a grand, all-encompassing view of London, fog, mud, mire, and the proceedings of the Court of Chancery. The narrator suggests a metonymic connection of some sort between these things. The vocabulary of literary criticism and cognitive linguistics will help explain why such a deployment of the figure is unjustified; and work from cognitive linguist Ronald Langacker can help explain what the novel would need to do in order to justify such an association. I will then show what the novel does instead. That is, rather than showing a single, linear chain of contiguous links connecting Chancery to the fog and filth of London, the novel complicates the nature of connections and contiguity, as well as our ability to grasp and comprehend the scale and density of interconnectedness in the city. I will suggest that first-person narrator Esther—much like the novel's other, third-person narrator—also reads the city and her place within it metonymically. However, in contrast to the third-person narrator's all-encompassing view of the city and its interconnections, Esther's subjective, limited view is more personal and more emotionally charged. This helps to justify the initial, proposed metonymies, but it also unpacks their disturbing implications in a way that is more visceral. As the novel unfolds, Esther wades into what George Gissing called "a great gloomy city, webbed and meshed" (1: 174), or what Morton calls, simply, the mesh. Reading Metonymy Most literary studies of metonymy build on Roman Jakobson's discussion of metonymy and metaphor as constituting two distinct poles of thought. Jakobson associates metaphor with the axis of selection, based on similarity, and he associates metonymy with the axis of combination, based on contiguity (129–30). More recent work on metonymy in cognitive linguistics likewise privileges contiguity.1 Whereas metaphor can bridge across domains or schemas via similarity, metonymy operates by contiguity within a single domain.2 With this in mind, it makes sense to approach metonymy in a novel by focusing on how a novel necessarily must leverage our existing domains or schemas to point to, indicate, or reference elements out in the real world. However, this comes with its own challenges. Elaine Freedgood, [End Page 122] for example, notes metonymy's "inability to stop wandering and the unpredictability of the associations that it may spark in the minds of readers" (13). After Roland Barthes, Freedgood differentiates between "strong" and "weak" readings of metonymy, and she suggests that a strong reading requires...

Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane

Reviewed by: Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900 ed. by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane Crystal Lynn Webster Who Writes for Black Children? African American Children's Literature before 1900. Edited by Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. xvi + 384 pp. Cloth $120, paper $30. The burgeoning attention paid to African American children in the field of childhood studies has enriched critical approaches to both African American history and literature. This emerging focus has been marked by formal symposia, informal academic conversations, and new publications on topics in black childhood, a trend that represents a significant scholarly moment in childhood studies. Who Writes for Black Children? capitalizes upon this momentum and provides a valuable reflection on and contribution to each of these spaces of scholarly inquiry. The volume contains twelve essays and is divided into five sections. The final section offers a rich collection of literature for African American children authored and edited by both white and black writers. The twelve essays as a whole explore the formation of African American children's literature and readership by deploying new and innovative analytical lenses. In doing so, the collection produces both commentary on, and reproduction of, nineteenth-century literature that is an essential resource for scholars and students of African American and children's literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane pose generative inquiries in their introduction to the collection by identifying methodological entanglements inherent within locating nineteenth-century black child-readers and literature. These include social trends that dictated who could claim the category of "child" and infantilized African Americans. Capshaw and Duane argue that uncovering black literature and child-readers destabilizes conventional interpretations of childhood, authorship, and audience, a task the contributors enthusiastically embrace. As such, their definition of African American children's literature is intentionally [End Page 468] capacious, including literature and writings authored by adults and children, African Americans and whites, and texts that African American children may or may not have directly engaged. The first section uncovers black child-readers through an engagement of African American poets whose contributions to the field of African American children's literature have gone largely unrecognized, including Lucy Skipwith, Jupiter Hammon, and Frances Harper. Each of these essays employs "conjuring," a groundbreaking conceptual framework introduced by Angela Sorby, as a way to identify eighteenth- and nineteenth-century authors' attention to black child-readers. In the process of conjuring real and imagined black children, Sorby aptly argues these authors "make literate agency possible" (6). Conjuring, then, becomes an especially useful framework to locate both black readership and historical black children. The volume's second section on schooling practices and instructional texts provides salient archival representations of both of these topics, with especially illuminating examples of African American children's voices in the historical archive. Mary Niall Mitchell's exploration of the letters written by black children who attended New Orleans's Couvent School powerfully demonstrates the political agency of nineteenth-century African American children in ways that disrupt conventional narratives of children, African Americans, and emergent black political thought. In part 3, the contributors examine literature authored mainly by whites that directly addressed and represented African American children. As such, each of these essays challenges the exclusion of such texts from the genre of African American children's literature, as well as the assumptions of presumed readers of white texts and their significance for African American children. Here, Brigitte Fielder provides a model for examining white-authored children's literature by analyzing African American children's interpretations of nineteenth-century narratives of human-animal relations, thereby challenging readings of this literature as a reproduction of racist values. The bibliographic essays of the fourth section summarize sites of African American children's literature and provide an overview of works published in the Christian Recorder. The final section includes primary sources—poems, essays, and excerpts—many of which are addressed by the contributors. This collection of texts lays the groundwork for the development of a distinct genre of African American children's literature. As is stated in the volume's introduction, most of the essays are concerned with...