Always another edition [electronic resource] : the racial politics of rewriting in nineteenth-century American literature
Keywords: English.

This dissertation offers a theory of rewriting as a personal and political practice for black writers nineteenth-century America. Literary scholars have linked the prevalence of reprinting and the proliferation of textual versions during the nineteenth century to cultural attitudes towards intellectual property and literariness. In the study of textual iteration, scholars of literature have theorized intertextuality and revisionism between and among writers or identified aspects of the literary marketplace as motivating factors in the production of multiple textual versions. Textual scholars who have examined textual multiplicity during the nineteenth century and beyond, have often searched for the most correct textual version or the one that can be said to most closely align with the writer's original intention. Always a Second Edition argues that while nineteenth-century African American writers produced multiple textual versions, they did so under a distinct set of conditions and that the resulting texts constitute rewrites. The writers under study in this dissertation rewrote and republished their own texts—a distinguishing and defining facet of rewriting—and they used textual multiplicity to question and protest the social and political conditions they faced and to publically constitute themselves as free, literate individuals in creative control of their texts and their selves. In practice, I read across and between the published versions of William Wells Brown's quartet of Clotel novels, Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies, and Charles Chesnutt's rewrites of his conjure tales to decouple textual changes from historical change. Brown's rewrites and republications of his novel—it appeared in four versions between 1853 and 1867—expose the conditional nature of both text and race and, at the same time, Brown's own multiple self-fashioning. Reading the Clotel novels as rewrites, I show how Brown addresses himself to the idea that enslavement is a fixed condition and challenges that notion through his shifting series of texts. Frederick Douglass's three autobiographies demonstrate increasing ownership over self and text. Douglass's first autobiographical act, 1845's Narrative, is commonly understood to have brought him into being as a free and literate man, but that first autobiography is only one text in a series. With each subsequent rewrite, the textual history of Douglass's literacy becomes more complicated; he becomes his own critic and editor, taking and retaking possession of his stories and of himself. Reading Chesnutt's multiple textual versions as rewrites reveals a neglected sense of authorship based on racial hybridity and offers an opportunity to view concerns internal to Chesnutt as author. Further, rewriting provides a way in which to understand the complexity of Chesnutt's identity. By holding both versions of Chesnutt's rewritten stories in mind, we come to appreciate the dynamic relationship between versions as a dialectic internal to Chesnutt himself rather than projecting that relationship outward onto broader, binary black-or-white racial concerns. Always a Second Edition ultimately offers a conceptualization of rewriting that attends to the particular nature and prevalence of rewriting among black writers in the nineteenth century.