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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 43
... significantly , journal- ism of every variety . As Carla Peterson notes in the introduction to her study of nineteenth - century black women's literature , this expansive definition of literature includes " genres and texts that would ...
... significance of the free black popu- lation has been both overlooked and undervalued . One reason for this is that their ... significant and illuminating distinctions in background , prestige , attitudes , behavior , power , and culture ...
... significance and timeliness of this recuperative work and the impor- tance of the formerly underrecognized experience of ... significant portion of the black community whose experience was different from that of the black working class ...
... significant threat to the future of the slave system and to maintaining black subordination generally. They were aware also of the centrality of written texts of national con- struction to both the legitimacy of the new nation and to ...
... significant threat not only to the economic stability of the system of slavery but to the personal safety of whites in the region as well . As the governor of Georgia noted in a response to the Appeal , the 26 Forgotten Readers.
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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 |