The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature.

Abstract

This treatise describes the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. It describes how modernists have rebelled against the standard image, reimagining themselves as racial aliens and mimicking the strategies of dialect speakers. At the same time, African-American writers have struggled to free themselves from dialect as it has been rendered by white dialect writers.