English Literature and the Other Languages

The thirty essays in English Literature and the Other Languages trace how the tangentiality of English and other modes of language affects the production of English literature, and investigate how questions of linguistic code can be made accessible to literary analysis.

This collection studies multilingualism from the Reformation onwards, when Latin was an alternative to the emerging vernacular of the Anglican nation; the eighteenth-century confrontation between English and the languages of the colonies; the process whereby the standard British English of the colonizer has lost ground to independent englishes (American, Canadian, Indian, Caribbean, Nigerian, or New Zealand English), that now consider the original standard British English as the other languages the interaction between English and a range of British language varieties including Welsh, Irish, and Scots, the Lancashire and Dorset dialects, as well as working-class idiom; Chicano literature; translation and self-translation; Ezra Pound's revitalization of English in the Cantos; and the psychogrammar and comic dialogics in Joyce's Ulysses, As Norman Blake puts it in his Afterword to English Literature and the Other Languages: There has been no volume such as this which tries to take stock of the whole area and to put multilingualism in literature on the map.

It is a subject which has been neglected for too long, and this volume is to be welcomed for its brave attempt to fill this lacuna.