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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 68
... literary study . Their literary socie- ties were both large and small ; they planned reading lists and provided regular opportunities for black writers to publish original literary cre- ations , both orally and in print . Members ...
... Literary Societies , little scholarly attention has been paid to these organizations or to the readership that they ... study of the literary societies and reading practices of African Americans between 1830 and 1940 I will discuss why ...
... literary studies as a discipline have defined themselves in terms of their rela- tionship to oral , or vernacular , culture . Denied direct forms of written expression , black Americans turned to traditional vernacular forms to ...
Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies Elizabeth ... studies in the History of the Book have long been promi- nent in Europe ... study of the History of the Book , like those established by Pennsylvania ...
... literary practices of African Americans , we must be willing to look in new ... study of black readers and reading need , however , to decenter formal ... literary education . To uncover a more nuanced and more accu- rate history of their ...
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 |