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.

Gavin Jones is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University.

"Jones advances the understanding of the piace of dialect in U.S. literature [and] weaves extensive documentation from period critics into close analyses of Twain's western voice, of language in Melville and Henry James, of New York dialects in works of Crane and Cahan. . . . Every student of U.S. language in relation to culture meaning should read this book for its deftness in bringing sympathy to a complex issue and its elevation of the level of discussion from casual opinion to carefully researched and digested historical research."—Choice

"[Jones] links obscure forays into dialectology with familiar canonical works of literature in surprising and innovative ways. He also has some astute insights into the politics of language in this country—a topic as current now as it was during the period about which he writes."—Shelly Fisher Fishkin, University of Texas, Austin