Strange Talk

The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America

By:

Gavin Jones

Format:

Paperback / softback

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Description

Late-19th-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black prescence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominent language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.

Author Biography:

Gavin Jones is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

Release date NZ

October 19th, 1999

Author

Gavin Jones

Audience

Professional & Vocational

Pages

299

Dimensions

152x229x18

ISBN-13

9780520214217

Product ID

7699009

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