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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 84
... social systems that were designed , in the words of Frances Smith Foster , to " repress and dehumanize , if not destroy black people , " free blacks in the urban North realized the urgency of creating their own opportunities to become ...
... social and cultural forces from which it emerges , rather than a pure or abstract idea , independent of history , " historians of the book have shifted their attention away from writers and the texts they produce to readers and the ...
... social relations that dominate their lives.28 Recent scholarship on contemporary cultural productions such as rap and hip hop demonstrates the same incentive to portray the extent to which members of the black working class , although ...
... social and literary history. The stories of free, northern blacks who used reading and writing to voice an American optimism provide a crucial counterweight to the history of southern slaves and the literary tradition of the slave ...
... social justice to illustrate that their treatment was “ in direct violation of the letter and spirit of [ the ] Constitution . " 11 Walker had hope for the future : " What a happy country this will be , he advised his readers toward the ...
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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 |