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Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America
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2001
Year
Critical Race TheoryLiterary TheoryAmerican RenaissanceRhetoricBritish LiteratureEarly American LiteratureGavin JonesCultural StudiesAmerican LiteratureSocial SciencesDialect LiteratureLiterary CriticismRaciolinguisticsAfrican American StudiesAmerican IdentityCultural HistoryLanguage StudiesLiterary StudyPost-colonial CriticismImaginative WritingLiterary HistoryGeorge Washington CableContemporary FictionStrange TalkGilded Age AmericaEnglish CultureRustic Raciness
Late‑nineteenth‑century America’s fascination with dialect permeated popular literature while simultaneously fueling anxieties over moral decline, immigration, race, and gender. The study investigates the aesthetic politics of dialect in overlooked regionalists and canonical authors. The author examines works by Cable, Twain, James, Melville, Crane, Cahan, and Dunbar to analyze how vernacular was employed. The analysis shows that minority dialects were used to politically respond to racial oppression and to portray a multicultural nation.
Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: 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 presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected cult of the 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.