Book Frontiers Reconstructing Readers and Reading in a Nineteenth Century Eastern Cape Missionary Journal
Date
2006-11-17T10:57:10Z
Authors
Clarke, Russell Paul
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Abstract
This study is a historical analysis of readers and the practices of reading in the late
nineteenth century Eastern Cape, with particular focus on the Lovedale Institution. Well
known as the progenitor of an African elite, the Lovedale mission institution, school and
Press have been well-documented and studied, as has the Eastern Cape frontier – but the
role of books and reading in their social and material practice has seldom been examined
in very close detail in relation to this imagined textual community. A close examination
of the contemporary evangelical journal, The Christian Express, reveals much in terms of
what was being read, and how reviews and secondary matter on texts that were in
circulation may have influenced conceptions of what books and literacy meant to the
people reading the journal. These ideas have been traced through advertisements,
reviews, columns and letters in order to understand the ways in which the journal
portrayed books as material and intellectual objects. Delving deeper than the materiality
of the book in an empirical world, however, this study seeks to analyse how books and
readers were both constructed and represented, and involves an attempt (although
admittedly a highly theoretical undertaking) to reconstruct the various reading strategies
employed by readers on the frontier of race, class, and nation.
Description
Faculty of Humanities
School of Language and Literature
9807000g
russelle@webmail.co.za
Keywords
Readers, Reading, Eastern Cape, Lovedale, Alice