"Eawr Folk": Language, Class, and English Identity in Victorian Dialect Poetry

McCauley, Larry

doi:10.1353/vp.2001.0014

Cited by 35 publications

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References 2 publications

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“…Hollingworth also emphasises the dialect community – dialect as ‘performance’, to return to Hakala (7). In a similar study, and from another American scholar, Larry McCauley tackles both the sociological and the aesthetic functions of dialect in industrial Lancashire, as characterised by Edwin Waugh’s ‘Eawr Folk’, describing an enthusiastic gathering of autodidacts.…”

Section: Divergence and Contact Between Social History And Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections

Edney

2011

Literature Compass

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Literary as well as linguistic scholars study dialect use in Victorian poetry and prose: the linguistic group generally examines the specifics of language use and tries to map its occurrence with a view to understanding its wider socio‐linguistic significance. Literary‐inclined research is interested in the aesthetic effects and affective power of local dialect – why a writer would choose to use it if they could as easily write in national English. The 19th century was a rich period for dialect writers and linguists alike. Literary English dialect – that is, the use of local language in narrative, dramatic or lyrical textual contexts – proved adaptable and expressive for a wide range of Victorian writers from Wordsworth to Dickens, and could transcend geographical and sociological boundaries. Recent studies have attempted to make more mutually helpful connections between linguistic and literary research, taking account of the history of both while encouraging wider debate across the two disciplines and their numerous sub‐categories. In the 21st century, diminishing linguistic diversity is a cross‐disciplinary concern for writers and researchers, as it relates to greater, global cultural shifts and even to biodiversity loss – losing the name for a thing might result in losing the thing. This essay picks out recent studies that seek to address these connections between linguistic and literary interests, and that provide scope for further exploration, linking research into Victorian attitudes to their cultural futures with our own.

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Section: Divergence and Contact Between Social History And Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections

Edney

2011

Literature Compass

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The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

2019

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Poetic genres are not predetermined, unchanging categories but collections of texts that are perceived to share features. When we recognize generic categories as malleable, we are more likely to welcome a wider range of texts and authors, including women writers, into the literary canon. And a more inclusive canon leads to a wider recognition of formal shapes and rhetorical effects within each genre. Studying poetry by women gives us a fuller understanding of the constraints and potentials of each genre. Of course, Victorian women writers were constrained not only by literary conventions but also by social conventions and institutional inequalities. Isobel Armstrong has explored the ways female poets both worked within and critiqued conventions of gendered experience, but she also warns, "a concentration on moments of overt protest can extract the content of a direct polemic about women's condition in a way which retrieves the protest, but not the poem." 1 In what follows, I trace women poets' protests while attending to poetic form in experiments with genre, from the sonnet to the epic. As we shall see, women poets often protest social limitations while pushing against generic constraints, finding previously untapped potential in a genre, or offsetting the limitations of one genre by incorporating the strengths of another. Sonnet SequencesA sonnet is made up of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter connected through an intricate rhyme scheme (though in Modern Love [1862], George Meredith expands his sonnets to sixteen lines). The sonnet flourished in Elizabethan England, retreated in the eighteenth century, and reemerged with new subject matter in the Romantic period with the success of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (1784). In Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB) returned the sonnet sequence to a focus on love, yet she inverted or reimagined traditional Petrarchan conceits. Whereas in sonnet sequences by Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Spenser, 13

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The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

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"Eawr Folk": Language, Class, and English Identity in Victorian Dialect Poetry

Cited by 35 publications

References 2 publications

Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections

Recent Studies in Victorian English Literary Dialect and its Linguistic Connections

The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Poetry

Chronology of Publications and Events

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