TY  - JOUR
A1  - Adamik, Verena
T1  - Making worlds from literature
BT  - W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess
JF  - Thesis eleven : critical theory and historical sociology
N2  - 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.
KW  - African American literature
KW  - Eurocentrism
KW  - genre
KW  - intertextuality
KW  - race
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513621993308
SN  - 0725-5136
SN  - 1461-7455
VL  - 162
IS  - 1
SP  - 105
EP  - 120
PB  - Sage
CY  - London
ER  -