Literary dialect

Dialect Literature and English in the USA: Standardization and National Linguistic Identity

by Lisa Minnick

In Varieties in Writing in English: The Written Word as Linguistic Evidence, ed. Raymond Hickey. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010.

This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and... more This chapter analyzes the role of literary dialect in attempts to establish a distinctly American language and especially to authorize and enforce a preferred standard. The roles of gender, race, and linguistic diversity are key considerations to the analysis in light of popular nineteenth-century assumptions that conflated ideas about a preferred national language variety with developing ideologies about national identity. This chapter outlines the ways that these assumptions found voice in the national discourse, including via the deployment of literary dialect, which both documented and participated in that discourse.

Representations of Speech and Attitudes about Race in The Sound and the Fury

by Lisa Minnick

Southern Journal of Linguistics 25:1/2, 2003

Jim’s Language and the Issue of Race in Huckleberry Finn

by Lisa Minnick

Language and Literature 10:2, 2001

Literary Dialect

by Lisa Minnick

In Language in the American South, Montgomery and Johnson, eds. The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Kelman’s Art-Speech

by Scott Hames

in *The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman*, ed. Scott Hames (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), pp. 86-98.