Dialect and Dichotomy Literary Representations of African American Speech

The unique contribution of this book is the combination of methods the author uses to approach the study of literary dialect. While incorporating computational analysis of language made possible by recently available text-analysis programs, she also uses more traditional techniques of literary criticism and dialect study to evaluate dialect in literary texts. - Cynthia Bernstein, editor of The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics ""Minnick considers the social and political implications of African American English as depicted in four literary works: Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. The author's wise choice to view her topic through the work of two Caucasians and two African Americans gives the study a desirable and necessary balance.... Minnick notes that Caucasian authors have employed African American English to make their writing realistic and, in Faulkner, to arrive at subtle interpretations of the racial attitudes of his characters. But she acknowledges that African American writers face the question of whether the desire to represent black experiences authentically competes both with the demands of the market and with trends within the political and literary movements of African American thinkers and artists. This is an important and highly original study."" - Choice