The Victorians and English Dialect

The Victorians and English Dialect PDF Author: Matthew Townend
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198888198
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious. The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. Tracing the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It goes on to explain how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.

Nineteenth-century English

Nineteenth-century English PDF Author: Richard W. Bailey
Publisher: University of Michigan Press ELT
ISBN:
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Traces the transformation of the English language through the nineteenth-century economic and cultural landscape.

Passing English of the Victorian Era

Passing English of the Victorian Era PDF Author: J Redding Ware
Publisher:
ISBN: 9789354029905
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry

Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry PDF Author: Barbara Barrow
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429575203
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Barrow’s timely book is the first to examine the link between Victorian poetry, the study of language, and political reform. Focusing on a range of literary, scientific, and political texts, Barrow demonstrates that nineteenth-century debates about language played a key role in shaping emergent ideas about popular sovereignty. While Victorian scientists studied the origins of speech, the history of dialects, and the barrier between human and animal language, poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Hardy drew on this research to explore social unrest, the expansion of the electorate, and the ever-widening boundaries of empire. Science, Language, and Reform in Victorian Poetry recovers unacknowledged links between poetry, philology, and political culture, and contributes to recent movements in literary studies that combine historicist and formalist approaches.

The Victorians and English Dialect

The Victorians and English Dialect PDF Author: Professor of English Matthew Townend
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780198888123
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The Victorians and English Dialect tells the story of the Victorians' discovery of English dialect, and of the revaluation of local language that was brought about by the new, historical philology of the nineteenth century. Regional dialects came to be seen not as corrupt or pernicious, but rather as venerable and precious. The book examines the work of the ground-breaking collectors of the 1840s and 1850s, who first alerted their contemporaries to the importance of local dialect - and also to the perils that threatened it with extinction. Tracing the connection between dialect and literature, in the flourishing of dialect poetry and the foregrounding of regional voices in Victorian fiction. It goes on to explain how the antiquity of regional dialects cast light on the national past - the Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Vikings - and how dialect study was also at the heart of the discovery of local folklore and oral culture: old words, old customs, old beliefs. And it tells the story of the three great monuments of Victorian dialect study that marked the apogee of regional philology: the 80 publications of the English Dialect Society (1873-96), an organization run by a committee of journalists and local historians in Manchester; the nationwide survey of The Existing Phonology of English Dialects (1889), which listened in on local speech in market squares and third-class railway carriages; and the multi-volume English Dialect Dictionary (1898-1905), which collected all the previous labours together, and made an enduring record of Victorian dialect.

The Cambridge History of the English Language:

The Cambridge History of the English Language: PDF Author: Norman Blake
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781139055536
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 734

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Book Description
Volume II deals with the Middle English period, approximately 1066-1476, and describes and analyzes developments in the language from the Norman Conquest to the introduction of printing. This period witnessed important features such as the assimilation of French and the emergence of a standard variety of English. There are chapters on phonology and morphology, syntax, dialectology, lexis and semantics, literary language, and onomastics. Each chapter concludes with a section on further reading; and the volume as a whole is supported by an extensive glossary of linguistic terms and a comprehensive bibliography. The chapters are written by specialists who are familiar with modern approaches to the study of historical linguistics.

Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

Dialect and Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century PDF Author: Jane Hodson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131715147X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation in the literary uses of dialect, with dialect becoming a key feature in the development of the realist novel, dialect songs being printed by the hundreds in urban centres and dialect poetry becoming a respected form. In this collection, scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, including dialectology, literary linguistics, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the history of the English language, have come together to examine the theory, context and ideology of the use of dialect in the nineteenth century. The texts considered range from the Cumberland poetry of Josiah Relph to the novels of Frances Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell, and from popular Tyneside song to the dialect poetry of Alfred Tennyson. Throughout the volume, the contributors debate whether or not 'authenticity' is a meaningful category, the significance of metalanguage and paratext in the presentation of dialect, the differences between 'literary dialect' and 'dialect literature', the responses of 'insider' versus 'outsider' audiences and whether the representation of dialect is a hegemonic or resistant strategy. This is the first book to focus on practices of dialect representation in literature in the nineteenth century. Taken together, the chapters offer an exciting overview of the challenging work currently being undertaken in this field.

Yorkshire Dialect in 19th Century Fiction and 20 th Century Reality. A Study of Dialectal Change with the Example of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and the Survey of English Dialects

Yorkshire Dialect in 19th Century Fiction and 20 th Century Reality. A Study of Dialectal Change with the Example of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and the Survey of English Dialects PDF Author: Kirsten Nath
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3638427064
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1-, University of Hamburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: Proseminar: English Dialects, language: English, abstract: “Emily Brontë’s only novel is considered to be one of the most powerful and enigmatic works in English literature.” (Alexander/Smith 2003: 553)Wuthering Heights(first published in 1847) is indeed a very powerful novel which is to its greatest part achieved by its setting in the Yorkshire moors and the realistic representation of the local transactions. Emily Jane Brontë was born in 1818; at the age of two she moved with her family to Ha-worth, West Riding of Yorkshire. Except for a few short journeys, Emily Brontë stayed in Yorkshire all her life and could thus vividly describe her Yorkshire surroundings as the setting of her novel. Furthermore, the Yorkshire dialect (based on Haworth dialect) in the speech of some of her characters adds to the completeness of the novel’s setting (Waddin gton-Feather 2004: 1). Most characters in the novel use a dialect word or phrase every now and then; Joseph, however, speaks Yorkshire dialect almost exclusively. Joseph is the old servant at Wuthering Heights (which is both, the name of the novel and that of the house). Joseph is very religious and loyal to whoever is his master at the time. Ac-cording to Ellen Dean, the housekeeper at Wuthering Heig hts, he is “the wearisomest, selfrighteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses on his neighbours.” (Brontë 1994: 48-49) Hence, Joseph is an ambiguous character in the mind of the reader: on the one hand, he is always grumpy, quite harsh and even mean at times; on the other hand, he is an old man who is always truthful and loyal ; it seems he is always as good a person as his respective master is. Joseph’s use of dia lect reflects the roughness of Wuthering Heights and its surroundings. The old man speaks an old dialect and lives in the old farmhouse. The house is habitable but not comfortable and it is always exposed to stormy weather. The same holds true for Joseph’s dialect: it is intelligible but not easy to understand and it is constantly looked down upon by the higher classes. Joseph’s dialect sounds quite rough although there is a certain beauty in it, just like the Yorkshire moors are said to be rough but beautiful. Finally, it suggests a lack of education if a speaker uses dialect solely, as Joseph does. Nonetheless, Joseph and his dialect resist all the storms which approach throughout the novel.

Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle

Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle PDF Author: Christine Ferguson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351923323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
Christine Ferguson's timely study is the first comprehensive examination of the importance of language in forming a crucial nexus among popular fiction, biology, and philology at the Victorian fin-de-siècle. Focusing on a variety of literary and non-literary texts, the book maps out the dialogue between the Victorian life and social sciences most involved in the study of language and the literary genre frequently indicted for causing linguistic corruption and debasement - popular fiction. Ferguson demonstrates how Darwinian biological, philological, and anthropological accounts of 'primitive' and animal language were co-opted into wider cultural debates about the apparent brutality of popular fiction, and shows how popular novelists such as Marie Corelli, Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, H. Rider Haggard, and Bram Stoker used their fantastic narratives to radically reformulate the relationships among language, thought, and progress that underwrote much of the contemporary prejudice against mass literary taste. In its alignment of scientific, cultural, and popular discourses of human language, Language, Science, and Popular Fiction in the Victorian Fin-de-Siècle stands as a corrective to assessments of best-selling fiction's intellectual, ideological, and aesthetic simplicity.

The Oxford History of English

The Oxford History of English PDF Author: Lynda Mugglestone
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199660166
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 613

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Book Description
This text traces the language from its obscure Indo-European roots to its 21st-century position as the world's first language. It describes the history of English within the British Isles, its changing roles in different places, and its rise to global pre-eminence.