Forgotten Readers

McHenry Elizabeth McHenry

Description

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 Elizabeth McHenry delves into archival sources, including the records of past literary societies and the unpublished writings of their members.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.

Sujets

• USA
• Inglés estadounidense
• American English
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 31 octobre 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384144
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

forgotten readers

A John Hope Franklin Center Book

New Americanists

A Series Edited by Donald E. Pease

Forgotten Readers

Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies

c elizabeth m henry

Duke University Press Durham and London 2002

∫2002 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

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 appear on

the last printed page of this book.

Publication of this book has

been aided by a grant from

the Abraham and Rebecca Stein

Faculty Publication Fund of

New York University, Department

of English.

For

Mom and Dad, and

Grandma and Pop

1

2

3 4 5

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction: In Search of Black Readers 1

‘‘Dreaded Eloquence’’: The Origins and Rise of African American Literary Societies 23 Spreading the Word: The Cultural Work of the Black Press 84 Literary Coalitions in the Age of Washington 141 Reading, Writing, and Reform in the Woman’s Era 187 Georgia Douglas Johnson and the Saturday Nighters 251 Epilogue: Building Community in Contemporary Reading Groups 297

Notes 317 Bibliography 387 Index 401

Acknowledgments

This book took shape over a number of years, and I am pleased to acknowledge the many friends, colleagues, archivists, and institutions that sustained me throughout the process of writing it. Although I began this project after I had completed my doctoral dissertation, I owe a tremendous debt to those individuals at Stanford University without whose assistance I would never have completed graduate school. First and foremost, I wish to thank Shirley Brice Heath, whose friendship, unflagging support, and scholarly integrity made a lasting impression on my work. Even before I had finished my dissertation, she encouraged me to pursue my interest in African American literary societies, and she has extended herself in innumerable ways to support me personally and professionally. I am also indebted to Rob Polhe- mus, George Dekker, Ramón Saldívar, and Diane Middlebrook, all of whom proved to be inspired teachers, careful readers, and constructive critics, even after my o≈cial days as a student were over. Throughout the years, funding from several sources supported my research and writing. Much of the research for the book was con- ducted while I was a fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, where I was supported for one year by the Ford Foundation and then for another by a teaching/ research fellowship from the College of the Holy Cross. Given the Du Bois Institute’s enthusiastic sta√ and the rich intellectual atmo- sphere cultivated there, I was ideally situated to begin thinking about nineteenth-century African American readers and the various coali-