Abstract

This paper uses a comparative analysis of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance and James Still’s novel River of Earth to parse popular language ideologies concerning the Appalachian English dialect of ‘Mountain Speech.’ Deliverance portrays Appalachian natives as ignorant and violent, utilizing non-standard orthography to represent eye-dialect of Appalachian Speech; it feeds the story on stereotypes related to the popular stigmatized terms for Southerners as “Red-necks” and “hicks.” James Still’s River of Earth portrays Appalachian language and culture accurately as Still lived in Appalachia his whole life. Yet, despite these inaccuracies, Deliverance remains the more popular novel, even being turned into a movie in 1972. This paper proposes the theory that Dickey’s novel is more popular because his voice as a Southern writer lends credibility to popular stereotype, whereas Still’s combats stereotype with factual evidence garnered from his time amongst Mountain Folk.

Highlights

  • Deliverance inadvertently portrays Appalachian natives as ignorant and violent, utilizing non-standard orthography to represent eye-dialect of Appalachian Speech; it feeds the story on stereotypes related to the popular stigmatized terms for Southerners as “rednecks” and “hicks.” James Still’s River of Earth portrays Appalachian language and culture in a way that celebrates it

  • This paper proposes the theory that Dickey’s novel is more popular because his voice as a Southern writer lends credibility to popular stereotype, whereas Still’s combats stereotype by offering a rich perspective of quotidian life in Appalachia, garnered from his time amongst Appalachian natives

  • I originally decided to pursue this topic when discussing the inherent racism within some novels, when it diverged from, or converged to, Standard English, paying special attention to the contexts in which authors portrayed a cultural group that did not habitually speak Standard English; this form is represented by traditional orthography, which is the normative style of the form of words

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Summary

Introduction

This paper uses a comparative analysis of James Dickey’s novel Deliverance and James Still’s novel River of Earth to parse popular language ideologies concerning the Appalachian English dialect of ‘Mountain Speech.’ Deliverance inadvertently portrays Appalachian natives as ignorant and violent, utilizing non-standard orthography to represent eye-dialect of Appalachian Speech; it feeds the story on stereotypes related to the popular stigmatized terms for Southerners as “rednecks” and “hicks.” James Still’s River of Earth portrays Appalachian language and culture in a way that celebrates it. I chose James Dickey’s Deliverance, widely celebrated as a popular novel, and James Still’s River of Earth, which, despite its lackluster popularity, is thought of by Appalachian scholars to be one of the premier representations of Appalachian life, language, and culture.

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