Reading the Renaissance
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€91.99
A01=Mary I. Unger
African American community leaders
African American cultural pride
African American heritage
African American inspiration
African American intellectuals
African American legacy
African American literature heritage
African American pride and heritage
African American trailblazers
African American women's achievements
African American women's voices
American literary history
Author_Mary I. Unger
Black Chicago Renaissance
Black literary pioneers
Black Literature
Black press
Black publishing industry
Black readership
Black women writers
Black women's intellectualism
Black women’s intellectualism
books about cultural history
Bronzeville's Black Women
Bronzeville’s Black Women
Category=DS
Category=DSK
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=WQH
Chicago cultural history
Chicago history
Citizen-readers
community history books
community leaders in history
community storytelling
Consumerism
cultural changemakers
cultural history of Bronzeville
cultural pioneers
empowering history books
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forgotten Black women
Great Migration
hidden voices
historic book clubs
historic women leaders
historic women readers
history of African American women
history of Chicago's South Side
influential African American voices
influential women in literature
inspirational African American women
inspirational women in history
Midwest African American history
powerful women in history
stories of resilience
stories of strength and resilience
untold African American stories
untold stories
women breaking barriers
women in cultural history
women in publishing
women leading communities
women making history
women preserving culture
women shaping culture
women who changed history
women's cultural influence
women's empowerment stories
women's history books
women's role in cultural change
Product details
- ISBN 9781625348593
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jun 2025
- Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
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.
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.
