"A penetrating account of the long debate about the kind of public language appropriate for a democratic society. . . . Cmiel manages to do justice to both sides."--Christopher Lasch, author of The Culture of Narcissism "Every scholar interested in the English language will put this book next to Mencken and Baugh. It will be indispensable to writing the social history of English into the 20th Century."--Joseph Williams, author of Origins of the English Language
Late-nineteenth-century America was crazy about dialect: vernacular varieties of American English entertained mass audiences in "local color" stories, in realist novels, and in poems and plays. But dialect was also at the heart of anxious debates about the moral degeneration of urban life, the ethnic impact of foreign immigration, the black presence in white society, and the female influence on masculine authority. Celebrations of the rustic raciness in American vernacular were undercut by fears that dialect was a force of cultural dissolution with the power to contaminate the dominant language. In this volume, Gavin Jones explores the aesthetic politics of this neglected "cult of the vernacular" in little-known regionalists such as George Washington Cable, in the canonical work of Mark Twain, Henry James, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane, and in the ethnic writing of Abraham Cahan and Paul Laurence Dunbar. He reveals the origins of a trend that deepened in subsequent literature: the use of minority dialect to formulate a political response to racial oppression, and to enrich diverse depictions of a multicultural nation.
This edited volume studies how in European literary culture the codified verbal system of rhetoric shifted towards persuasion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In Rhetoric of the Protestant Sermon in America: Pulpit Discourse at the Turn of the Millennium, ten scholars analyze notable sermons from the fifty-year span between 1965 and 2015, during which the Protestant sermon has undergone significant change in the United States. Contributors examine how this turbulent time period witnessed a variety of important shifts in the arguments, evidences, and rhetorical strategies employed by contemporary preachers. Because religious practice is inextricably tangled in the culture, politics, and economy of its historical situation, the public expression of a faith is certain to move with the times. In their treatment of race, sex, gender, class, and citizenship, sermons apply ancient texts to current events and controversies, often to revealing effect. This collection, thoughtfully edited by Eric C. Miller and Jonathan J. Edwards, demonstrates how the genre of the Protestant sermon has evolved—or resisted evolution—across the years. Scholars of religion, rhetoric, communication, sociology, and cultural studies will find this book particularly useful.
