Book description
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 ranges 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 and
gallows narratives, Francophone poetry and 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-and
how this expansion can enrich and transform the study of print culture
more generally.
Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia.
"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
Lara Langer Cohen teaches English at Wayne State University and is
the author of The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and
Antebellum Print Culture, also available from the University of
Pennsylvania Press. Jordan Alexander Stein teaches English at the
University of Colorado at Boulder.
