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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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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... Elizabeth McHenry. Forgotten Readers elizabeth mchenry Duke University Press Durham and London 2002 2002 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the. Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies.
... Printed in the United States of America on acid - free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Adobe Garamond with Weiss italic display by Keystone Typesetting , Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging- in - Publication Data ...
... printed texts . Al- though technically free , this population also faced systematic resis- tance to their efforts to gain and exercise their literacy . Like their enslaved brethren in the South , however , they recognized that reading ...
... printed word affected the thought and behavior of mankind during the last five hundred years . ' 16 Emphasiz- ing their belief that " literature is a human institution , part of a matrix of social and cultural forces from which it ...
... printed texts. Although literary work was but a component of the black women's club movement, reading and literature were essential to black women's efforts to contest racist discourses and represent them- selves as moral and worthy of ...
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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 |