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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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 71
... 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 was a ...
... texts specifically, are crucial representatives of one aspect of African American literary production in the nineteenth century, the danger of privileging them is that we risk overlooking the many other forms of literary production that ...
... texts they produce to readers and the context in which literary texts are received and read.17 The wide definition of exactly what constitutes the History of the Book has also necessitated that its practitioners abandon the bounda- ries ...
... texts been acquired and exchanged ? These questions will expand our perspective beyond the classroom to a series of nonacademic venues like churches , private homes , and beauty parlors that have , since the nineteenth century , been ...
... texts that would be con- sidered either ' nonliterary ' by modernist criteria . . . or ' minor ' by historical standards , and thus unworthy of serious attention . ” 23 Lack of serious attention to these texts and genres as literature ...
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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 |