When William Barnes began publishing poems in the Dorset County Chronicle in the 1830s in the dialect of his native Blackmore Vale, the first poems that appeared were in the form of eclogues — ...dialogues between country people on country matters. Although an immediate success, the eclogues were in time overshadowed by the many lyric poems that Barnes published in the dialect. They are now perhaps the most undervalued works by this brilliant but neglected poet. Each eclogue is, effectively, a one-scene play, demanding performance for its potential to be realized. The phonemic transcripts in this book, based on the findings in T. L. Burton’s William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (2010), show what the poems would have sounded like in Barnes’s own time; the accompanying audio recordings (made at the 2010 Adelaide Fringe) give living voice to the sounds noted in the transcripts.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, as the industrial revolution began to make its impact upon the printing and distribution trades, vernacular verse became more readily available in written ...form. Yet, unsurprisingly, this verse rarely appeared in dialectal form. Although most originators, hearers, and readers must have been speakers of a regional dialect, standard orthography was itself a relatively recent phenomenon, and there was no recognized means of portraying dialect pronunciation in print. So the broadsheets and handbills that became increasingly common, featuring the "bonny mining lads" or the crimes, hangings, and disasters of the time, were predominantly printed in standard forms of language. Such pessimistic visions can be exaggerated, however, and may reflect the standpoint of the academic observer reading those countless anthologies and collections of dialect verse that filled the shelves of Lancashire libraries in the twentieth century or are appearing frequently online now. They may well distort the reality of how the Lancashire public, and a wider Northern audience, have come to appreciate this verse.
This series, developed from Tom Burton's groundbreaking study, William Barnes's Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (The Chaucer Studio Press, 2010), sets out to demonstrate for the first time what ...all of Barnes's dialect poems would have sounded like in the pronunciation of his own time and place. Every poem is accompanied by a facing-page phonemic transcript and by an audio recording.
This thesis explores the notion of opposition in the Sonetti romaneschi by the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli (1791-1863). It sees the poet as a warring rebel on the literary scene and examines ...his poetics and rhetoric of war through his choice of form (the hallowed sonnet structure), language (the ‘rotten’ vernacular) and subject (the downtrodden, previously voiceless underclass); it shows that these cornerstones of Belli’s opus are in polemical response to literary stimuli and intimately connected to the political, religious and sociological upheavals in and beyond Rome in the troubled run-up to Unification. Chapter one, entitled ‘Breaking the mould’, draws on Belli’s explicit declaration of war on his literary predecessors, and considers the influence of the Milanese writer Carlo Porta, arguing that Belli is more inimical than amicable, and not the simple imitator as thought to date. Chapter two, ‘A passage of arms: possessing the dialogue sonnet’, maintains that the fulcrum of Belli’s antagonistic poetics and his realist enterprise lies in his unprecedented use of the dialogue sonnet form and the staging of direct debate. Chapter three, entitled ‘The Battle of the Sexes’, treats opposition at a thematic level, applying gender studies and related theory to Belli for the first time. Chapter four, ‘War and peace: the silent revolution’, examines Belli’s creation of a totally new literary language, fulfilling the criteria for what Deleuze and Guattari, within broadly Marxist parameters, would identify as a ‘minor literature’ in the work of Kafka, in which a major language is somehow wrested from its anchors of power, or ‘deterritorialized’, to subvert the literary world from within. The thesis shows that Belli is more revolutionary than previously thought as a literary innovator, and an understudied giant of modern European literature as opposed to the marginal figure the historiography is wont to maintain.
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