Abstracts
Abstract
This essay describes some of the challenges in understanding reading experiences associated with daily newspapers of the 1830s and 1840s. It then explores the scrapbook, poetry, and editorial career of New Yorker Almira Loveland, revealing how Loveland translated and transformed newspaper material from disposable to keepsake, man’s world to woman’s world, and sensational to sincere, ultimately returning it in new forms to the public sphere through her work as poet, editor, and activist. While her case is no doubt a special one, it suggests that the masculinist editorial bombast of these papers is not determinative of the modes of reading and mobilization they enabled, and it offers an invitation to imagine a diversity of reading experiences little documented in the archives.
Résumé
L’article qui suit s’intéresse à des expériences de lecture associées aux quotidiens des années 1830 et 1840. Il s’attarde notamment à la carrière de la New-yorkaise Almira Loveland, qui, par ses activités de poète, d’éditrice et de militante réussit à transformer ce qu’on trouvait dans ces mêmes journaux pour le retourner, tout autre, à la sphère publique : ce qui était hier à jeter valait désormais la peine d’être conservé; ce qui était confiné au monde des hommes se frayait un passage jusqu’à celui des femmes; ce qui était sensationnaliste devenait authentique. Le cas de Loveland est, à n’en pas douter, hors du commun, mais suggère néanmoins que les modes de lecture et de mobilisation suscités par les journaux de l’époque n’étaient pas nécessairement soumis à la grandiloquence éditoriale toute masculiniste affichée par ceux-ci. Il invite également à explorer des expériences de lecture très diversifiées, mais dont on trouve peu de traces dans les archives.
Appendices
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