Early African American Print Culture
Edited by Lara Langer Cohen, Wayne State University; and Jordan Alexander Stein, assistant professor of English at CU
University of Pennsylvania Press
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem.
In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars range over periods, locations and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's seventeen chapters consider domestic novels, gallows narratives, Francophone poetry, engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers.
Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation and reading. The volume suggests that this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.
“‘Early African American Print Culture’ reads like a manifesto, a call to action—sometimes directly, by cataloging the work that remains to be done, and sometimes simply by offering models of scholarship on familiar and unfamiliar authors and texts. The central point, of course, is that we need to attend to the whole of American print culture if we are to understand the complexities of African American writing throughout the nineteenth century.”
University of Pennsylvania Press
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw both the consolidation of American print culture and the establishment of an African American literary tradition, yet the two are too rarely considered in tandem.
In this landmark volume, a stellar group of established and emerging scholars range over periods, locations and media to explore African Americans' diverse contributions to early American print culture, both on the page and off. The book's seventeen chapters consider domestic novels, gallows narratives, Francophone poetry, engravings of Liberia, transatlantic lyrics and San Francisco newspapers.
Together, they consider how close attention to the archive can expand the study of African American literature well beyond matters of authorship to include issues of editing, illustration, circulation and reading. The volume suggests that this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture more generally.
“‘Early African American Print Culture’ reads like a manifesto, a call to action—sometimes directly, by cataloging the work that remains to be done, and sometimes simply by offering models of scholarship on familiar and unfamiliar authors and texts. The central point, of course, is that we need to attend to the whole of American print culture if we are to understand the complexities of African American writing throughout the nineteenth century.”
—John Ernest, West Virginia University