Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective of vernacular activities and creolization. It shows that African-Americans, while readily mastering the conventions and canons of Euro-America, also drew on knowledge of their own to make an oppositional repertoire of signs and meanings. Distinct from conventional script literacy on the one hand, and oral culture on the other, these "creolized" vernacular practices include writing in charms, use of personal or nondecodable scripts, the strategic...
Challenging monolithic approaches to culture and literacy, this book looks at the roots of African-American reading and writing from the perspective o...
In this innovative study, Cohen demonstrates a major cultural shift from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century by exploring the popular literature of crime and punishment. Tracing the declining authority of Puritan ministers and Calvinistic notions of sin, he explores how they were replaced by a romantic, pluralistic literary marketplace where new professionals, lawyers - journalists, and even fiction writers - defined morals and clairified authority. Cohen begins with a comprehensive survey of the entire field of crime literature in New England during the seventeenth and...
In this innovative study, Cohen demonstrates a major cultural shift from the colonial period to the mid-nineteenth century by exploring the popular li...
