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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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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Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies Elizabeth McHenry ... literary and oratorical skills . دو Let me compare Douglass's antebellum ... activities of the many northern benevolent and missionary societies that ...
... activity , not only for individuals but for society as a whole . Despite their exclusion from institutions of formal education and their limited access to literary ... literature . At the beginning of the nine- teenth century they began ...
... literary activities of black Americans generally after the Civil War have remained largely invisible . Students of African American literature , history , and culture have come to know that “ invisible things are not necessarily ' not ...
... literary history does not include the literature or literary activities of African Americans . With few exceptions , the words African Americans did write were not val- ued by libraries , museums , archives , or other institutions ...
... activities of black readers may come from unexpected sources . It also suggests that to understand black readers , then and now , we must be willing to expand our notion of the very definition of literature and literacy , and their ...
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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 |