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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 75
... nineteenth-century African American readers and the various coalitions that supported them. In particular my thanks go to Henry Acknowledgments.
... nineteenth century. But while they are the most familiar, they are not the only examples of African American reading and writing from this period. Less well- known are stories of the e√orts of free blacks in the urban North to acquire ...
... nineteenth century. There are a series of complex and interrelated reasons for their invisibility that have as much to do with recent trends in scholarship on African American history and literature as with the di≈culty of conducting ...
... nineteenth century, with the slave narratives of two individuals, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, serving as representatives of the form. While slave narratives generally, and these two texts specifically, are crucial ...
... nineteenth century certainly complicates this work. By and large, what has been preserved as the ''o≈cial'' record of American literary history does not include the literature or literary activities of African Americans. With few ...
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 |
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Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary ... Elizabeth McHenry Xem trước bị giới hạn - 2002 |