Down Home and Uptown: The Representation of Black Speech in American Fiction
- ISBN-10
- 0838631304
- ISBN-13
- 9780838631300
- Pages
- 216
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1984
- Publisher
- Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
- Author
- Sylvia Holton Peterson
Description
Holton's thesis is that regardless of its categorization by linguists as a dialect or creole language, the speech of black Americans is distinctive and is an emergent literary language. She reviews the efforts to define the nature and historical origins of black English and its linguistic features and describes how the shaping of a convention for representing black speech was followed by a reaction demanding a realistic representation of the speech of black Americans. This reaction was central to the formation of a black literary aesthetic in the postmodern period, and its development is illustrated by the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Langston Hughes, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison. She also examines the varieties of narrative method available to American fiction writers with the black and standard English at their disposal, as well as the relationship between black fictional characters and the narrators.
