Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations
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MaryAnn Snyder-Körber
MaryAnn Snyder-Körber is Professor of American Cultural Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Recent research considers modernisms in the context of globalizing modernities, the aesthetics and connective potentials of small forms such as the anecdote or mini-podcast, articulation as a key analytical concept in cultural studies (and beyond), gender discourses and feminisms in addition to commoning as a cultural/literary practice. Publications includeAnecdotal Modernity: Making and Unmaking History , co-edited with James Dorson, Florian Sedlmeier, and Birte Wege (2012) andMachine: Bodies, Genders, Technologies. Heidelberg, co-edited with M. Michaela Hampf (2012). She further co-edits the Würzburg University Press seriesJMU Cultural Studies with Zeno Ackermann and is a founding board member of the De Gruyter Brill seriesFeminisms Past and Present. Her current projectMobile Feminisms: Gender, Social Media, Transnational Interactions is being prepared for publication with co-editors Simi Malhotra, Suman Bhagchandani, Sakshi Dogra, and Lukas Hellmuth.
Abstract
While most often remembered as the first novel published by an identifiable African American author, William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter(1853) is not a text concerned with inauguration or originality. Its defining mode is rather continuation. Clotelitself continues. The 1853 novel that readers are most likely to know is actually only one of four nineteenth-century versions of the novel. Brown’s reworking of the rumors regarding Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and their children continues in Miralda; or The Beautiful Quadroon. A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact, which was published serially in The Weekly Anglo-African(1859 – 1861), the Union soldier dime-novel Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States(1864), and Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States(1867). Reading these texts together as Clotels, the contribution recalibrates approaches to Brown’s writing and offers a nineteenth-century print culture case study in continuation as a compositional principle.
Abstract
While most often remembered as the first novel published by an identifiable African American author, William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter(1853) is not a text concerned with inauguration or originality. Its defining mode is rather continuation. Clotelitself continues. The 1853 novel that readers are most likely to know is actually only one of four nineteenth-century versions of the novel. Brown’s reworking of the rumors regarding Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and their children continues in Miralda; or The Beautiful Quadroon. A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact, which was published serially in The Weekly Anglo-African(1859 – 1861), the Union soldier dime-novel Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States(1864), and Clotelle; or the Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States(1867). Reading these texts together as Clotels, the contribution recalibrates approaches to Brown’s writing and offers a nineteenth-century print culture case study in continuation as a compositional principle.
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
Chapters in this book
- Frontmatter I
- Acknowledgments
- Table of Contents VII
- Introduction: Forms of Narrative Continuation 1
- Continuation and the Novel: Open Context and the Problem of Closure 15
- Clotels: Bad Beginnings, Instructive Continuations 31
- “He Keeps Happening”: Character and Situation in W. D. Howells’s A Modern Instance 61
- Serial Singularity: Reading for the Project Form in the Business Romance 83
- Genre-Bending Literary Fiction and the Pleasure of Immersion in Fictional Worlds 113
- The Eternal Draft: Authorial Revision and Philip Roth’s Construction of the Oeuvre 141
- Nicole Krauss’s To Be a Man: Implications of Continuity in the Jewish American Short Story Collection 165
- Ali Smith and the Unfinished Book: Novels, Middles, and Serialization in an Electronic Age 197
- Of Masks and Men: Percival Everett’s James 221
- Eclogue: The End of History in Verse (Continued) 247
- Shakespeare, Ibsen, and the Staged Future of Robots 267
- The Remake as Fetish Art: On Gus Van Sant’s Psycho and Other Psychos 293
