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5 results

  • Talking to peasants: language, place and class in British fiction 1800–1836

  • JANE HODSON
  • Journal:
    English Language & Linguistics / Volume 27 / Issue 3 / September 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    17 October 2023, pp. 543-560
    • Article
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  • This study uses the Dialect in British Fiction 1800–1836 database to chart the changing representation of the language of the labouring poor during the early nineteenth century. It finds that, broadly speaking, while the voices of the labouring poor are sometimes represented in novels at the start of the period, most novels evince little interest in either the linguistic nuances of these characters’ speech, or the access to their lives and thoughts that this speech provides. Around the middle of the period, there is a rapid increase in the fictional representation of the voices of the labouring poor specifically in novels set in rural Scotland and Ireland and – at least in some novels – this is connected to a greater interest in the lives and perspectives of these characters. By the end of the period, while there is a broadening out into extraterritorial varieties and a continuing interest in the voices of the rural labouring poor of Scotland and Ireland, these developments have not translated in any substantial way to an interest in either the rural labouring poor of England or Wales, or the urban labouring poor of any nation or region. Overall, the study demonstrates how fiction can be used to provide an insight into changing attitudes towards speakers and language varieties.

  • 26 - Romantic cultural imperialism

  • from Part IV - The Ends of Romanticism
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 601-620

  • Summary

    Scholars gradually recognize that most of the major writers of the Romantic period had at least a passing flirtation with the most prominent cultural component of imperialism, namely, Orientalism. Nature poetry, suggests that Orientalism helped to define political, social and cultural practices in areas far removed from the East itself. the most successful Orientalist tales or pictures in the Romantic period, of which Byron would later claim to provide the finest 'samples' depended upon a sometimes jarring discrepancy. The concept of the sovereign Western subject would prove essential to the work of the empire-builders of the nineteenth century. Wordsworth's struggle is therefore to rescue Poetry from being merely 'a matter of amusement and idle pleasure', as though a taste for Poetry were as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry'. Orientalism, then, was hardly just a thematic 'sideshow' for Romantic poetry.

  • 22 - The epigenesis of genre: new forms from old

  • from Part III - Histories: Writing in the New Movements
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 507-526

  • Summary

    Discarding the 'classical' theory of genre, Friedrich Schlegel wrote provocatively that there is only one genre or as many genres as texts. The cultural discipline subtended by the system of genres was in flux by the Romantic period. This chapter focuses on three generic radicals that are distributed across the formal divisions between prose, poetry and non-fiction prose: extensive genres; intensive genres; and genres-in-progress. The word genre is also connected to 'gender' and 'engendering'. In this period 'epigenesis' gradually replaced 'preformation' as an account of how organisms develop. Epigenesis, as a result, became an account not just of how an organism develops but also of the emergence of new species. The impact of the development of the embryo is evident in Hegel, who worked on both natural history and art. The novelizing other extensive genres allows poetry to be removed from its current esotericism and seen as producing the novel.

  • 20 - Following up The reading nation

  • Edited by David McKitterick, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
    Published online:
    28 March 2010
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 704-735

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses the study of reading in the early nineteenth century Anglophone world, The reading nation in the Romantic period that has been the subject of many reviews, seminars, interrogations, blogs and personal communications. The titles of works, variations on 'history of the British book trade', often disavow any ambition to discuss the consumer interest. The chapter approaches the conceive of texts, books, reading and consequences not only as a chronological parade of book producers but as a complex literary system within a wider cultural system. An analysis of the historic book industry seen this way sets out to retrieve the changing governing structures within which books were produced in the form that they were and not in others, including state textual controls, the legal framework, and business practices. In order to understand the economic relationships between prices, production and timing of access, we need to retrieve the intellectual property regime within which book publishing occurred.

  • 8 - France, Germany, America

  • from Part II - Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life
  • Edited by James Chandler
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature
    Published online:
    28 May 2009
    Print publication:
    05 March 2009, pp 204-223

  • Summary

    Self-consciousness about being English can be traced very early in the national literature. It is often hard to be sure whether the reference is to a political, racial, social or linguistic category, or to some unspoken measure of each. The predominance of France and Germany and eventually of America as the Romantic period's most commonly discussed foreign places does not then reflect any single or self-evident set of historical circumstances. America and its literature were throughout the Romantic period somewhat minor objects of attention in British literary circles. The effort at legitimating a national literary language gave writers and intellectuals an ideal form for a German language. Toward the end of the eighteenth century contemporary German literature began to feature in its own right in British literary circles. For many British readers and critics before about 1820, American culture and literature was merely an accidental extension of an English tradition, they read what we write, their writers are our writers.