Book Frontiers Reconstructing Readers and Reading in a Nineteenth Century Eastern Cape Missionary Journal

[摘要] This study is a historical analysis of readers and the practices of reading in the latenineteenth century Eastern Cape, with particular focus on the Lovedale Institution. Wellknown as the progenitor of an African elite, the Lovedale mission institution, school andPress have been well-documented and studied, as has the Eastern Cape frontier – but therole of books and reading in their social and material practice has seldom been examinedin very close detail in relation to this imagined textual community. A close examinationof the contemporary evangelical journal, The Christian Express, reveals much in terms ofwhat was being read, and how reviews and secondary matter on texts that were incirculation may have influenced conceptions of what books and literacy meant to thepeople reading the journal. These ideas have been traced through advertisements,reviews, columns and letters in order to understand the ways in which the journalportrayed books as material and intellectual objects. Delving deeper than the materialityof the book in an empirical world, however, this study seeks to analyse how books andreaders were both constructed and represented, and involves an attempt (althoughadmittedly a highly theoretical undertaking) to reconstruct the various reading strategiesemployed by readers on the frontier of race, class, and nation.

[发布机构] University of the Witwatersrand