No Dialect Please, You're a Poet

Claire Hélie is a Senior Lecturer at Université de Lille, France.Elise Brault-Dreux is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Valenciennes, France.Emilie Loriaux is a Lecturer of English at the University of Artois, France.

• Introduction Part I: Rooting dialects in late 19th century poetry 1. Foundations of English Dialect Poetry 2. The "boggle" in the "waäste": Meaning and mask in Tennyson’s dialect poems 3. "Leave off trying to put the Robbie Burns’ touch over me" – D.H. Lawrence’s dialect poems Part II: British dialects in 20th-21st c. poetry 4. The Problem with Dialect Poetry 5. "Lumbs & Orts": Ted Hughes and Dialect 6. Under-Mining The Meaning: Women’s Dialect Poetry and the 1984-5 UK Miners’ Strike 7. "Yan Tan Tethera": The Uses of Dialect in Tony Harrison’s Poetry 8. "Between memory and water"/ A phonetic analysis of Ian McMillan’s evocation of life on the English canals in his "fruity Yorkshire Brogue." Part III: (Not so) new dialects in contemporary poetry 9. "Nae poet eer writes ‘common speech’, Ye’ll fin eneuch o yon in prose": Scots and Scottish English from Robert Louis Stevenson to Tom Leonard 10. Not English: On the Importance of Dialect in Poetry in Ireland 11. "Sometimes I wanda / Who will translate / Dis / Fe de inglish?": Strategies for Transcribing Jamaican Creole in the Dub Poems of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah 12. Sloughing off Empire: "Multi-monolingualism" in Daljit Nagra’s British Museum 13. Bringing Homer Home: Nation versus Birminghamisation in Two Vernacular English Iliads

Dialects have long been what make language interesting, but we have needed to know more about dialect in poetry. This book offers a thorough and exhilarating introduction to the poetics of dialects, and it couldn’t come at a better time.Patrick R. QueryUS Military AcademyAuthor of Ritual and the Idea of Europe in Interwar Writing