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.

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

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 English language is a battlefield. Since the age of Shakespeare, arguments over correct usage have been bitter, and have always really been about contesting values-morality, politics, and class. The Language Wars examines the present state of the conflict, its history, and its future. Above all, it uses the past as a way of illuminating the present. Moving chronologically, the book explores the most persistent issues to do with English and unpacks the history of "proper" usage. Where did these ideas spring from? Who has been on the front lines in the language wars? The Language Wars examines grammar rules, regional accents, swearing, spelling, dictionaries, political correctness, and the role of electronic media in reshaping language. It also takes a look at such details as the split infinitive, elocution, and text messaging. Peopled with intriguing characters such as Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, and Lenny Bruce, The Language Wars is an essential volume for anyone interested in the state of the English language today or its future.

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.