Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary SocietiesDuke University Press, 31 thg 10, 2002 - 440 trang Over the past decade the popularity of black writers including E. Lynn Harris and Terry McMillan has been hailed as an indication that an active African American reading public has come into being. Yet this is not a new trend; there is a vibrant history of African American literacy, literary associations, and book clubs. Forgotten Readers reveals that neglected past, looking at the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum north and among African Americans following the Civil War. It places the black upper and middle classes within American literary history, illustrating how they used reading and literary conversation as a means to assert their civic identities and intervene in the political and literary cultures of the United States from which they were otherwise excluded. Forgotten Readers expands our definition of literacy and urges us to think of literature as broadly as it was conceived of in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members. She examines particular literary associations, including the Saturday Nighters of Washington, D.C., whose members included Jean Toomer and Georgia Douglas Johnson. She shows how black literary societies developed, their relationship to the black press, and the ways that African American women’s clubs—which flourished during the 1890s—encouraged literary activity. In an epilogue, McHenry connects this rich tradition of African American interest in books, reading, and literary conversation to contemporary literary phenomena such as Oprah Winfrey’s book club. |
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... were al- ways just the ones I needed to continue. Ken Carpenter served as my editor for the first big article I ever published, and his sound advice has guided my writing ever since. Over the years I've Acknowledgments xi.
... crusade of the New England school - ma'am , ” whose mission was “ planting New England schoolhouses among the white and black of the South . ” These scenes — the first of an individual slave covertly 2 Forgotten Readers.
... first of an individual slave covertly learning and teaching others to read , the second of the great masses of former slaves being educated in schoolhouses established and run by an army of New England school teachers — constitute the ...
... first organizing literary so- cieties; these societies encouraged and supported a great variety of writing, much of which found its way into print in the early news- papers and periodicals directed toward an African American reader ...
... first century , it has become a vital field in the United States . Centers for the study of the History of the Book , like those established by Pennsylvania State University and the University of Wisconsin , as well as the Society for ...
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23 | |
The Cultural Work of the Black Press | 84 |
3 Literary Coalitions in the Age of Washington | 141 |
4 Reading Writing and Reform in the Womans Era | 187 |
5 Georgia Douglas Johnson and the Saturday Nighters | 251 |
Building Community in Contemporary Reading Groups | 297 |
Notes | 317 |
Bibliography | 387 |
Index | 401 |