THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN LITERARY LANGUAGE

The literature of America has been largely one of exploration. American literature has served as a text, commenting on American culture and society. As the nascent text was compiled, various social changes in this country helped edit it, and American authors began to face the problem of finding a means through which these changes could be represented in literature. One of the ways in which this quest for a literary medium--capable of expressing the wide range of elements in America--manifested itself was through experimentation with varying language forms; hence no discussion of American literature can be complete without a discussion of the language from which it derives and the elements that went into making what I shall henceforth term American literary language.;I begin my first chapter by exploring the historical influences that helped differentiate America's spoken English from that of England. When the settlers left their mother country in the 1600's they brought with them a spoken language that was incapable of rendering many of the new experiences they faced; so it changed and adapted. The same was true for the written language of American authors, but native modes of written language which could effectively represent the New World experience were slow in developing. In time, however, realizing that their language must alter along with the experiences they sought to portray, American authors turned to the use of literary dialect as one means of coping with this dilemma.;I use Herman Melville's technique in Moby-Dick as an exemplification of the growing need for a new literary language. His use of literary dialect as a vehicle to help redefine the American identity created an early form of American literary language.;The problem of what distinguishes literary dialect from literary language arises at this point, and using Charles Chesnutt and Joel Chandler Harris, I show the divergent purposes behind the use of the same language form. Harris uses the form as a limited device to reinforce a preconceived view of a portion of America, and it remains a mere literary dialect. Chesnutt uses it as an expanded device to portray the intricate relationships of the American social order at the time he was writing, and it begins to grow into American literary language.;The written representation of regional and social dialect, vernacular, and the creation of other non-standard forms of language and language use began to work their way into the works of American authors, and from these dialects a particularly American literary language was born. The purpose of this study in effect is to define the particulars of American literary language and to trace the course of its development through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by using the work of Herman Melville, Charles W. Chesnutt and Joel Chandler Harris, and Zora Neale Hurston as illustrations of its growth.;It only remains to define the characteristics of American literary language, and using Zora Neale Hurston I do so. Through Hurston's writing we see a clear definition of American literary language as a linguistic form which utilizes many techniques--compounding, dialect, vernacular, and borrowing to name a few.;The work of Zora Neale Hurston may be seen as inheriting the many attempts to create a precise and effective American literary language. At this advanced stage, it uses the various dialects of the nineteenth century and weaves them into a language that is able to draw on the full range of the pluralistic American historical tradition and give the American author the ability to write of his experience in an appropriate language.