Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Literary Studies
Episode: Coretta M. Pittman, "Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries" (UP of Mississippi, 2022)
Description: Literacy in a Long Blues Note: Black Women’s Literature and Music in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries by Coretta M. Pittman (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) traces the evolution of Black women’s literacy practices from 1892 to 1934. Pittman explores two distinct but related eras of Black women’s writing—the Women’s Era of the 1890s and early 1900s, and the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Casting a wide net, Pittman analyzes fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing by Black women along with songs performed and written by classic blues singers like Bessie Smith, Ma Rai...