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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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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Kết quả 1-5 trong 62
... context of a diversity of experiences, the attention of scholars of African American history and literature has largely been arrested by the experience of the southern slave and the fugitive slave narrative. The complex rhetorical aims ...
... context in which literary texts are received and read.17 The wide definition of exactly what constitutes the History of the Book has also necessitated that its practitioners abandon the bounda- ries that have traditionally divided the ...
... contexts of the actual reading practices of particular groups at particular times . Although studies in the History of the Book have long been promi- nent in Europe , American scholars did not energetically enter the field until early ...
... contexts — particularly the university and other institutions associated with a literary canon . New directions in the study of black readers and reading need , however , to decenter formal education as the primary institutional force ...
... literary societies in free black communities in the antebellum North in the context of early Americans ' understanding of reading , writing , and print as technologies of power and political agency. Although officially Introduction 19.
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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 |