Can I read Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America on EtoBox?

Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America by Elsa Nettels is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America about?

No other American novelist has written so fully about language--grammar, diction, the place of colloquialism and dialect in literary English, the relation between speech and writing--as William Dean Howells. The power of language to create social, political, and racial identity was of central concern to Americans in the nineteenth century, and the implications of language in this regard are strikingly revealed in the writings of Howells, the most influential critic and editor of his age. In this first full-scale treatment of Howells as a writer about language, Elsa Nettels offers a historical overview of the social and political implications of language in post-Civil War America. Chapters on controversies about linguistic authority, American versus British English, literary dialect, and language and race relate Howells's ideas at every point to those of his contemporaries--from writers such as Henry James, Mark Twain, and James Russell Lowell to political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Hay. The first book to analyze in depth and detail the language of Howells's characters in more than a dozen novels, this path-breaking sociolinguistic approach to Ho

Author

Elsa Nettels

Publisher

The University Press of Kentucky

Published

1988

Language

EN

ISBN

9780813185521

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Political Science, Literary Criticism