{"title":"The Book Circle: Black Women Readers and Middlebrow Taste in Chicago, 1943–1953","authors":"Mary I. Unger","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.11.1.0004","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article offers a case study of the Book Circle, a black women’s reading group on Chicago’s South Side, from 1943 to 1953. It demonstrates how the group recruited literary reception—specifically middlebrow taste—as a way to lobby for racial equality in the postwar era. In doing so, the Book Circle makes visible a group of twentieth-century black readers historically rendered invisible, as Elizabeth McHenry and others have shown. In this way, this article argues, recovering the Book Circle helps us further document the legacy of black women readers—from nineteenth-century literary clubs to black feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s through the 1980s—who turned to reading as a strategy for social transformation.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"59 1","pages":"20 - 4"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2019-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.11.1.0004","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
abstract:This article offers a case study of the Book Circle, a black women’s reading group on Chicago’s South Side, from 1943 to 1953. It demonstrates how the group recruited literary reception—specifically middlebrow taste—as a way to lobby for racial equality in the postwar era. In doing so, the Book Circle makes visible a group of twentieth-century black readers historically rendered invisible, as Elizabeth McHenry and others have shown. In this way, this article argues, recovering the Book Circle helps us further document the legacy of black women readers—from nineteenth-century literary clubs to black feminist consciousness-raising groups in the 1960s through the 1980s—who turned to reading as a strategy for social transformation.
期刊介绍:
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.