Talk:The Quadroons

Just finished peer reviewing your article. Good start.Bbelliott1875 (talk) 22:35, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Honestly I feel that you guys have an incredibly strong wiki page! I like that everything is clearly stated and clean, it makes your atricle easy to follow. Not to mention, I feel you guys have a very interesting story to write about. Great work guys! Aeoliver (talk) 00:02, 13 October 2019 (UTC) Andrea Oliver

Y'all still have a lot of cleaning up to do this week. Some suggestions might include breaking your plot summary into more readable chunks, mapping out what you want your sections to include (to avoid some of the repetition that currently exists throughout the article), implementing some more secondary sources, and tightening up your prose. (Nick) --Uncannydazzler (talk) 10:43, 21 October 2019 (UTC)

I would like to see some heavy editing happen here, as well as a bit of expansion on some sections (e.g. the Reception section). Would fix the formatting up on the character list to make it cleaner and maybe break up the plot summary into more than a single paragraph for readability. Check through everything to make sure you are writing cleanly and concisely. (Nick) --Uncannydazzler (talk) 13:22, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

It would also be nice to see some time dedicated to the Themes section to clean it up and (I think) expand it a bit. You keep returning to the tragic mulatta trope, which is awesome, but are their other things to be included about mixed-race characters, themes, etc? And I think your lead could offer a few more details as well. (Nick) --Uncannydazzler (talk) 13:37, 24 October 2019 (UTC)

Harriet Jacobs
The problems I see regarding Jacobs's Incidents are these:
 * Jacobs didn't need a fictional inspiration. To me, taken up also by Harriet Jacobs can only mean that Jacobs was inspired by Child. Otherwise, mentioning it in the lede would make no sense.
 * Jacobs's book was already virtually finished when Child started her editorial work. Mentioning Child's editorship of Incidents in the lede gives the wrong impression that Child had some influence on Jacobs's plot. According to Yellin's biography and her introduction to her edition of Incidents, Child only made stilistic changes and also did some re-arranging of the material.
 * According to H.Hanrahan, Jacobs may have wished to "counteract" the trope of the tragic mulatta.
 * The adjective "autobiographical" seems to imply that Jacobs wrote something like an "autobiographical novel", i.e. a combination of autobiography and fiction.
 * The text referring to Jacobs in the lede is longer than the text referring to her in the body of the article.

I'd suggest to remove Jacobs from the lede and to expand the text referring to her in the body. --Rsk6400 (talk) 19:36, 13 July 2020 (UTC)
 * "Taken up by" does not mean "inspired". Sorry. The answer here is not to cut highly relevant material from the lead (I mean, you cited Hanrahan already: look at the title of her article), but to add to it. And I disagree that "autobiographical" suggests "novel" as a noun to follow it. One way or another Child edited Jacobs, but you are reading too much into that: no one is taking away from Jacobs, and the "important changes" bit is clear enough. What needs to be done in the article is expanding on that, by adding some of the Hanrahan analysis to the article (it is quite obvious that Hanrahan is making that argument--that Jacobs practically flips the trope, in modern parlance), and rephrasing the lead accordingly. If this article gets up to a GA nomination, which I think is where it should go, it will have a lead in at least two paragraphs, the second of which will expand on that trope, mentioning not only Jacobs but also Clotel--and a generalizing remark on the trope in abolitionist literature. The other thing that needs to be done is to simply write up the trope of the tragic mulatta. BTW thank you for your note here. There is much work to be done. Drmies (talk) 00:28, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Your new wording of the lede is OK with me. Still, I think it's important to use the noun "autobiography" to avoid a possible misunderstanding since it was seen as a work of fiction until not long ago (and even until last year some parts of "her" WP articles made it look like one). BTW: I don't really like Hanrahan's essay. In my opinion, neither her interpretation of Jacobs's letter to the "Tribune" nor her presentation of Stowe's influence are correct. --Rsk6400 (talk) 06:08, 14 July 2020 (UTC)