Description
(Text)
This book is the first monograph devoted entirely to English dialect literature published between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Over the course of six chapters, the author employs frameworks from stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and other cognate fields to reveal the rich and varied forms that linguistic creativity takes in the work of dialect writers from across England between 1547 and 1877, ranging from Cumbria in the north-west and Newcastle in the north-east, to Cornwall in the south-west and Kent in the south-east. Challenging the traditional view of dialect literature as backwards-looking and conventional, this book makes a case for its stylistic ambitiousness and complexity. It covers a crucial phase in the history of dialect literature, from the sporadic early attempts of song-writers and pastoralists, to the heyday of the Victorian era, when regional writing flourished in almost every county of England. This book will be of interest to studentsand scholars of language, literature, dialect, regional writing and identity more generally; as well as students of renaissance, eighteenth-century, romantic and Victorian literature.
(Table of content)
Chapter 1: Introduction: Why read dialect literature?.- Chapter 2: What can dialect literature do? The functions of non-standard spelling.- Chapter 3: How does dialect literature do it? Making social meaning in dialect literature.- Chapter 4: How should we read it? The role of conversation and intersubjectivity in making sense of dialect literature.- Chapter 5: Where is dialect literature and how does it get there? The construction of place.- Chapter 6: What changed? Diachronic processes and the history of early English dialect literature.
(Author portrait)
Alex Broadhead is a Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. He has published articles and chapters on dialect representation in the work of William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, John Clare, Josiah Relph and Romantic-era fiction. His first book, The Language of Robert Burns, was published in 2014.
