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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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. |
Từ bên trong sách
Kết quả 1-5 trong 90
... United States of America on acid - free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Adobe Garamond with Weiss italic display by Keystone Typesetting , Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in - Publication Data appear on the last ...
... United States in the decades of the late- nineteenth and early - twentieth centuries . But today it is the persistent weakness of the literacy skills in African American communities that is most often cited and , even more ...
... United States , the very prospect of look- ing for readers is daunting in part because it must include the complex project of deciphering literacy , which surrounds us but proves difficult to measure and assess . Moreover , it is even ...
... United States , a project that will certainly raise new questions about book history in the United States even as it answers old ones . Principal among the new directions introduced by these questions will be in- creased attention to ...
... United States to document the ways minority cultures have interacted with books , as readers , writers , and publishers.20 If we are to gain further access to and understanding of the literate and literary practices of African Americans ...
Nội dung
1 | |
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 |