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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 96
... black people , " free blacks in the urban North realized the urgency of creating their own opportunities to become readers and institute systems through which to exchange and produce literature . At the beginning of the nine- teenth ...
... African Americans increasingly visi- ble , the reading practices of free blacks in the antebellum North and the literary activities of black Americans generally after the Civil War have remained largely invisible . Students of African ...
... black vernacular to African American literature and cultural production.12 This work has been critical and salutary ... free blacks were first organizing literary so- cieties; these societies encouraged and supported a great variety of ...
... African American culture in the North and the diversity of the communities of free blacks that formed there before the Civil War . This work should dispel once and for all what Willard Gatewood , writing in 1990 , called the “ myth that ...
... black Americans' experience in the United States. The result will necessarily be a more ... free North before the Civil War and the rehabilitative work of literary ... blacks as more legitimate than that of their middle- and upper-class ...
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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 |