‘The Vaïces that Be Gone’—Origins and Purity: the Dialect Poetry of William Barnes, philologist

This article sees the work of the ‘dialect poet’ William Barnes (1801–86) as an emblematic interaction between a certain sort of Romantic aesthetic and contemporary science. It examines firstly Barnes’s philological studies of dialect in relation to contemporary theories of the origins of language a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Paul Volsik
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2004-10-01
Series:Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/cve/15373
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Summary:This article sees the work of the ‘dialect poet’ William Barnes (1801–86) as an emblematic interaction between a certain sort of Romantic aesthetic and contemporary science. It examines firstly Barnes’s philological studies of dialect in relation to contemporary theories of the origins of language and the language of origins. It concludes with an examination of Barnes’s reinvestment and reinvigoration of the pastoral and the idyll—two ‘original’ forms that recreate a disappearing ‘purer’ and ‘original’ order.
ISSN:0220-5610
2271-6149