SOURCE: Levine, Robert S. “The African-American Presence in Stowe's Dred.” In Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, edited by Henry B. Wonham, pp. 171-86. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Levine explores Stowe's use of African American sources in Dred and her acknowledgement of those influences on her writing.

In “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison maintains that “the presence of Afro-American literature and the awareness of its culture” should inform our readings of white-authored texts, for “the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature.” As an example, Morrison remarks on how newly resonant “meanings” become available in the works of Melville when his writings are “scoured for this presence and the writerly strategies taken to address or deny it.” Morrison's essay has given rise to a methodology of “scouring...