The word on the streets : the American language of vernacular modernism / Brooks E. Hefner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hefner, Brooks E., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--20th century--History and criticism.

American literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (pages cm)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Charlottesville, [Virginia] ; London, [England] : University of Virginia Press, 2017.

Summary:

Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres--from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska--employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.

Contents:

Introduction: slanguage: toward a theory of American vernacular modernism

"The steady reaching out for new and vivid forms": H. L. Mencken and the American revolution of the word

"Never mind the comical stuff . . . they ain't no joke about this!": Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and the comic origins of vernacular modernism

"I didn't understand the words, but my voice was like dynamite": Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American break with realism

"Say it with lead": Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and modernism's underworld vernacular

"The necromancy of language": realist uplift and the urban vernacular in Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay

Conclusion: "but mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people": modernism's familial.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBC, viewed December 12, 2017).

ISBN:

9780813940427

0813940427

OCLC:

1011673716