Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore is a book by Elizabeth Mary Wright. It concerns dialect speech and lore used in countryside milieus, providing a survey for different words, phrases, names, superstitions, and popular customs in Britain.

Reproduction of the original: Lancashire Folk-Lore by John Harland, T.T. Wilkinson

This volume is intended to be a contribution to a special branch of the study of our own language. It proposes to trace in a popular manner and for general readers the changes of meaning which so many of its words have undergone; words which, as current with us as they were with out forefathers, yet meant something different on their lips from what they mean on ours.

First published in 1904, this book contains the conclusions of a series of lectures exploring the moral and historical value of single words. The author argues that, just as wisdom and knowledge are discoverable in books, so too are these treasures to be found in individual words themselves.

Recent developments in literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction, have come under attack for neglecting history, while historically-based approaches have been criticized for failing to take account of the problems inherent in their methodological foundations. This collection of essays is unique in that it focuses on the relation between post-structuralism and historical (especially Marxist) literary theory and criticism. The volume includes a deconstructive reading of Marx, essays that relate history to the philosophical and institutional context, and a number of studies of particular texts, literary and non-literary, which pose the question of history and literary theory with particular force.