This book is the first monograph devoted entirely to English dialect literature published between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Over the course of six chapters, the author employs frameworks from stylistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and other cognate fields to reveal the rich and varied forms that linguistic creativity takes in the work of dialect writers from across England between 1547 and 1877, ranging from Cumbria in the north-west and Newcastle in the north-east, to ...

This monograph offers a radical reconceptualization of the relationship between the poetics and practice of Robert Burns and reevaluates the nature of his role in the history of Scots. By drawing on ideas from twenty-first-century sociolinguistic theory, it seeks to transform the debate surrounding Burns’s language. Through a series of readings that explore the way in which Burns used and commented on the styles associated with different places, groups and genres, it demonstrates how langu...