Jean Lutes's New Co-Written Article (and the Nova Students Who Helped Make it Happen)

Professor Jean Lutes has co-authored an article that investigates a fascinating unpublished manuscript by turn-of-the-century African-American author Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The article appears in American Literary History, Volume 36, Issue 1, Summer 2024, and is titled"An Unpublished Tale about African American Poetry: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's 'The Grievances of the Books' (1897)."

The article acknowledges three Villanova students who helped to transcribe the unpublished manuscript that Professor Lutes and her co-writer, Professor Sandra A. Zagarell, wrote about: Current English major Jenine Hazlewood, '26; current master's student Matthew Villanueva, MA '24; and recent English major graduate Adrianna Ogando, '23. 

Here's an excerpt from the article that provides a flavor of Dunbar-Nelson's original piece:

In April 1897, an ambitious young author drafted a hallucinatory narrative that was never published. Its unnamed narrator falls asleep and dreams that real-life books and newspaper clippings by African American poets come alive. They call a convention, appoint her chair of a grievance committee, and task her with “listening to our complaints and suggesting remedies for our ills” (7). Meticulously written in graceful cursive with occasional strikeouts on 37 pages of unlined note paper, “The Grievances of the Books” is a funny, demanding, self-consciously literary mash-up that veers among reciting poetry, documenting authorial infighting, gently spoofing the formal political conventions organized to resist racial oppression, and lamenting the small readership for poems by African Americans. Taking readers on a breakneck tour of Black-authored poetry in the US, the narrative quotes from 13 published poems and refers to two others. Although it includes many poems published in the 1890s, “Grievances” stretches back to Phillis Wheatley’s publishing debut in 1773 and cites several antebellum verses. It ends, abruptly, with an indignant standoff between bound books and frayed clippings. As the narrator puts it in the manuscript’s final line, “the Grievances were never finished” (26).

You can read more from the article here.

Congratulations to Professor Lutes and to these students!