Dialect

It is both fortuitous and overdetermined that the critic most responsible for the view of dialect writing that American studies and cultural studies critics are challenging today was a man by the name of Krapp. Writing in the 1920s, George Philip Krapp (1925, 1926) insisted that dialect writing was a highbrow literary convention that always involved a patronizing class-based condescension. Krapp’s view came to dominate scholarship on the topic through much of the twentieth century. Indeed, it is echoed decades later in the ten-volume Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, which avers that dialect speakers in literature are usually presented as inferior, primitive, and backward (Asher and Simpson 1994). To be sure, the hierarchy that Krapp and others invoke was, historically, a component of much dialect writing. But recent scholarship emphasizes that the story is more complex and more interesting: dialect writing can be subversive as well as repressive, radical as well as conservative, as capable of interrogating status quo distributions of power as of reaffirming them. For these reasons, scholars of American studies and cultural studies are now considering dialect writing in more nuanced ways, increasingly recognizing that a practice previously sidelined as ephemeral and retrograde can be seen, in many cases, as the forerunner to important vernacular voices that have enriched twentieth- and twenty-first-century US and American culture.