Repurposing the Epigraph: Transforming a 19th-Century Literary Tradition for a 21st-Century Young Adult Readership

For women writers and writers of color seeking to publish in the 19th century, the use of epigraphs provided a means for gaining access to a public voice through popular print. Such use did not stop across time. This two-part study traces the origins and intertextual relationships of 290 epigraphs from five 19th-century novels—Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824), Caroline Kirkland's A New Home—Who'll Follow? (1839), Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867), and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900)—and, then, three 21st-century Young Adult (YA) historical fiction novels—Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793 (2000), Jennifer Nielsen's A Night Divided (2015), and Stacey Lee's The Downstairs Girl (2019)—to examine the use of epigraphs across the centuries of American literature. In particular, the tradition of 19th-century authors who used epigraphs to establish the credibility of their publications resonates in how today's YA historical fiction repurposes the epigraph genre to cultivate how readers use their critical literacy to question their situations and relationships.