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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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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... define my understanding of good leadership; to Koan Davis, gal- pal extraordinaire; and to Phil Barrish, Sabrina Barton, and Linda Ferreira-Buckley, whose friendship and generosity I remember fondly. My most profound thanks go to ...
... defined and extended them- selves to support me when I most needed it. Both Carla Peterson and Shelley Fisher Fishkin listened patiently as I alternatively voiced my enthusiasm and frustrations over my work, and their words were al ...
... defined themselves in terms of their rela- tionship to oral , or vernacular , culture . Denied direct forms of ... definition and delineation of the black vernacular as a category of African American literary study . Although this ...
... defined differently in different historical epochs.13 Even if we could agree on one precise definition of literacy , the task of delineating and portraying the American Introduction 7.
... 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 disciplines . In addition to cultural history and literary studies ...
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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 |