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Reading the Renaissance: Black Women's Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932-1953

Name: Reading the Renaissance: Black Women's Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932-1953
Brand: University of Massachusetts Press
SKU: 9781625348593
Price: 103.99 USD
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Contributors:

Mary I. Unger

Publisher:

University of Massachusetts Press

Binding:

Hardcover

Book Category:

Literary Criticism, History

Book Subcategory:

American, African American & Black, Social History

Book Topic:

African American & Black

Series:

Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

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The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

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Release Date:

2025-06-13

ISBN 13:

9781625348593

Weight:

1 lbs

Size:

9.10 x 6.40 x 1.30 inches

Pages:

235

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product description

Description

From 1932 to 1953, during the Black Chicago Renaissance, numerous literary events were held within and for the city's Black community. In book clubs, public forums, print reviews, little magazines, local programming, and other public venues, Black women in particular debated the role of literature in racial uplift efforts, set literary standards, and acted as community gatekeepers for cultural production during a time known as the Black Chicago Renaissance. Through these inspiring efforts, a mix of publishers, well-known authors, and everyday readers significantly fostered a robust literary culture in the Windy City.

Reading the Renaissance constructs a reception history of the Black women who read and reviewed, published and promoted, and collected and curated literature of the era. Mary Unger interprets how local figures such as Vivian G. Harsh, Ora Morrow, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Browning, Fern Gayden, and Margaret Walker cultivated particular literary tastes through collective acts of reading and reception. She does so by recovering a network of readers, book clubs, literary magazines, civic programs, and book businesses that Black women created, led, and transformed during the early 1930s through the early 1950s in Bronzeville, Chicago's predominantly Black South Side neighborhood.

This illuminating work includes close readings of texts alongside letters, scrapbooks, meeting minutes, reviews, and other ephemera of local reading practices to show how Black women facilitated diverse strategies of reading while instructing community members how to engage a variety of print cultures at the time. Unger demonstrates how Black women readers influenced individual authors as well as the norms and expectations of African American literature more broadly, becoming important (yet too often overlooked) players in American literary history.

About the Author
Mary I. Unger is an associate professor of English at Ripon College, where she is also the director of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program. Her writing has appeared in Reception, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), Legacy, and most recently in A Companion to Multiethnic Literature of the United States, edited by Gary Totten. Her work on race, gender, and reading has received several awards, including ones by MELUS and the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.

Reading the Renaissance: Black Women's Literary Reception and Taste in Chicago, 1932-1953

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