Read What 19th-Century Black Writers Read

To take 19th-century African American literature seriously, scholars must read the very books those writers were themselves reading—Dickens, Tennyson, Carlyle, Wordsworth—because the literature is saturated with borrowings and echoes (e.g., The Bondwoman's Narrative borrows from Dickens's Bleak House) that scholars untrained in that British/American tradition miss.