Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe
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In the first decades of the twentieth century, rural populations throughout Europe changed the language they used in everyday life, abandoning their traditional vernaculars--such as French patois, local Italian dialects, and the Irish language--in favor of major metropolitan languages such as French, Italian, and English. . In this book, Barry McCrea argues that the sudden linguistic homogenization of the European countryside was a key impulse in the development of literary modernism. The decline of rural vernaculars caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections. Se n R ord in in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages for use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist idealization of Irish as a lost utopian language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the sources and meanings of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how metropolitan literary culture was fundamentally shaped by the vanishing vernaculars of the European countryside.
Format:Hardcover
Language:English
ISBN:0300185154
ISBN13:9780300185157
Release Date:April 2015
Publisher:Yale University Press
Length:200 Pages
Weight:0.70 lbs.
Dimensions:0.8" x 5.7" x 8.5"
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