Making worlds from literature
- While W.E.B. Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is set squarely in the USA, his second work of fiction, Dark Princess: A Romance (1928), abandons this national framework, depicting the treatment of African Americans in the USA as embedded into an international system of economic exploitation based on racial categories. Ultimately, the political visions offered in the novels differ starkly, but both employ a Western literary canon – so-called ‘classics’ from Greek, German, English, French, and US American literature. With this, Du Bois attempts to create a new space for African Americans in the world (literature) of the 20th century. Weary of the traditions of this ‘world literature’, the novels complicate and begin to decenter the canon that they draw on. This reading traces what I interpret as subtle signs of frustration over the limits set by the literature that underlies Dark Princess, while its predecessor had been more optimistic in its appropriation of Eurocentric fiction for its propagandist aims.
Author details: | Verena AdamikORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621993308 |
ISSN: | 0725-5136 |
ISSN: | 1461-7455 |
Title of parent work (English): | Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology |
Subtitle (English): | W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess |
Publisher: | Sage |
Place of publishing: | London |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2021/02/16 |
Publication year: | 2021 |
Release date: | 2021/05/28 |
Tag: | African American literature; Eurocentrism; genre; intertextuality; race |
Volume: | 162 |
Issue: | 1 |
Article number: | 0725513621993308 |
First page: | 105 |
Last Page: | 120 |
Funding institution: | German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD); University Grants Commission (UGC)University Grants Commission, India; Department of English at the University of Potsdam; Department of German at the University of Potsdam; Department of German at the University of Delhi; Department of English at the University of Delhi |
Organizational units: | Philosophische Fakultät / Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik |
DDC classification: | 3 Sozialwissenschaften / 32 Politikwissenschaft / 320 Politikwissenschaft |
8 Literatur / 81 Amerikanische Literatur in Englisch / 810 Amerikanische Literatur in in Englisch |