(It also makes each edition available either as a reading text or as page images, enabling us to read Miralda, for example, alongside the news reports, letters to the editor, reprinted speeches, and abolitionist poetry that originally buttressed it.) Juxtaposing the four texts encourages readers to track Brown's revision process, in which he not only reorganized passages-here tagged with buttons that helpfully link to their counterparts in other editions-but changed the plot, characters, style, and ending of the novel dramatically. The site not only collects the four versions-a valuable endeavor in itself, especially in the case of the serialized version, republished here for the first time-but also allows readers to compare them by reading them in either two or three parallel columns. It offers beginning students and dedicated scholars alike an amazingly rich experience of Brown's novel on multiple levels.

Digitization, in other words, is poised to realize the multidimensionality the novel has always possessed but could never make fully legible within the confines of the printed page.Ĭonsequently, Christopher Mulvey's electronic edition of Clotel, part of the African American Research Library series from the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center, could not be a more welcome project. Itself a kind of web of texts-or 'text network,' to borrow the term Susan Gillman has recently coined to describe Uncle Tom's Cabin-Clotel seems ideally suited to the web's special technological capacity to juxtapose multiple texts, highlight textual variants, and link to annotations and other explanatory materials. Moreover, the novel famously (or infamously, depending on your perspective) recycles a host of other texts, from Brown's own autobiographical writings to Grace Greenwood's poem 'The Leap from the Long Bridge,' to Englishman John Relly Beard's biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture. A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact (serialized in the New York Weekly Anglo-African from 1860 to 1861) Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (published as part of James Redpath's series of dime novels for Union soldiers in 1864) and Clotelle or The Colored Heroine (1867). In the first place, Clotel is not really a book at all, but rather a series of books in which Brown would reinterpret his basic story over fourteen years: Clotel or the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (published in London in 1853) Miralda or, The Beautiful Quadroon. Perhaps no book cries out for a digital edition like William Wells Brown's novel Clotel.