Dark Princess: A Romance
Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt
- Publisher: Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York
- Date published: 1928
- Format: Hardcover
W.E.B. Du Bois' second novel, an international romance about an African American intellectual and an Indian princess and their cohort of Asian and African revolutionaries. The book was largely a financial and critical failure upon publication, with one reviewer stating: [Du Bois'] latest novel, Dark Princess, which mingles reality, fantasy and satire in distressing proportions, bogs the reader before he gets well into it. Characterization eludes Du Bois, probably because he is more interested in the future of the Negro race as a whole than in the Negro as novelist" (p. 607, Chamberlain, J. "The Negro As Writer: II," The Bookman: A Review of Books and Life, 70(6)). But the book has since received much scholarly attention for its intertexuality, subversion of the Eurocentric literary form, symbolism, and propagandistic value. One scholar describes it thusly: "Dark Princess ultimately resorts to a magical and bald-facedly escapist realm for its protagonist in which all contradictions that have built up over the course of the romance are haphazardly ousted, as any realistic course of action has been thwarted. The opulent combination of imageries from around the world in which the protagonists come to their romantic and political resolution points to the author's unsuccessful quest to locate materials from which to create a literary world that reflects the global ambitions of the work, yet nonetheless attempting to live up to his own call 'that if you want romance to deal with you must have it here and now and in your own hands'" (1926: 296; Adamik, Verena. Making worlds from literature: W.E.B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess, Thesis Eleven 2021 162:1, 105-120). The book was later republished in 1995 by the University of Mississippi Press and later by Oxford University Press, but copies of this first edition only occasionally appear in the trade (with none currently being offered [Jan. 2025]. As a humorious aside regarding the book's title, a 1927 letter from Alfred Harcourt to Du Bois reads: "Dear Dr. DuBois / Do you want the title to be 'The Dark Princess' or merely 'Dark Princess?' We prefer the latter, but you're the doctor." 8vo. Black cloth boards pictorially stamped in orange, 311 p. Lacking the scarce dust jacket. Cloth is worn along the board edges and spine ends with corner tips just exposed, about very good.
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