Reviewed by: Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America by Gavin Jones Edwin Battistella Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America. By Gavin Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 288. Interest in American regional speech and its consequences is as old as the nation itself. The period following [End Page 402] the Civil War was a particularly interesting period in that it saw the rise of dialect literature and the rise of commentary on dialect literature as well. In Strange talk, Gavin Jones argues that late nineteenth-century American culture—that of the so-called Gilded Age—was fundamentally ambivalent about dialect—seeing it as both representative of the vitality of American culture and as carrying the seeds of cultural fragmentation. The book consists of a brief introduction and conclusion and six main chapters. J has organized his book largely around different literary topics and genres which illustrate cultural attitudes and reactions to social change. Ch. 1, titled ‘Contaminated tongues: American philology and the problem of dialect’ (14–36), describes the attitudes toward dialect reflected in the scholarly work of the day—including that of William Dwight Whitney, Thomas Loundsbury, and E. A. Shelton, first president of the American Dialect Society. Their views reflect in part those of earlier scholars and writers that a common language of the American masses would emerge in the United States, but they also demonstrate occasional sympathy to the tradition of verbal criticism and correction of such writers as Richard Grant White, William Mathews, and George Perkins Marsh, who saw dialect use as a sign of moral degeneration and of the vulgarization of higher culture. In Ch. 2 (37–63), ‘Cult of the vernacular’, J discusses the use of dialect literature as a form of satire and as a reflection of literary realism. An assumption of the time was the idea that language reflected ways of thinking as well as ways of speaking. J notes that such writers as Mark Twain were ambivalent toward regional literature—both celebrating it and fearing its influence—and that this ambivalence is reflected in narrative inconsistency toward regional dialect. Ch. 3, ‘Language, gender and disease’ (64–97), treats the correlation between ‘faulty speech’ and social and cultural disease that was common in novels of the time. J especially focuses on ways in which Herman Melville and Henry James connected speech defects and defects of social and cultural behavior. Two psychological disorders much discussed in the Gilded Age were heterophony (confusion of words) and neurasthenia (nervousness), both of which were seen as symptoms of the corruption of cultural authority. Of special interest is J’s discussion of James’s essay on ‘The speech of American women’, which attributed indirection in language to the speech of women. In ‘White writers, creole languages’ (Ch. 4, 98–133), J examines the dialect literature of George Washington Cable and others whose work suggested a racially-mixed definition of Southern speech unsettling to white sensibilities of the time. J argues that literary and scholarly depictions of black English served two functions: to reinforce the view of black language as deficient but also to make the connection between black English and African and Caribbean languages (providing a counterview to the literary representation of black language as derivative of white Southern speech). The representation of dialect was complex rather than homogeneous, and the rhetorical features of African-American speech—including the potential for subversive humor—made it an effective narrative vehicle. Ch. 5, ‘Accents of menace alien to our air’: Language and literature in turn-of-the-century New York City’ (134–60), discusses the treatment of immigrant language in the tenement and immigrant fiction of the 1880’s and 1890’s—particularly the work of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan who extended local color writing from dialect literature to the immigrant experience. J notes that Crane’s approach focused on treating New York speech as decayed while Cahan’s focused on the hybrid nature of New Yorkese. The two approaches represent contrasting literary interpretations of urban life, one an attempt to capture the decay of language and the other an effort to characterize its transformation by immigrant voices...
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Mar 8, 2023
Khafiz Kerimov 
Open Access