The Word on the Streets : The American Language of Vernacular Modernism.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (296 pages)
Cover -- Title page -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 / "The Steady Reaching Out for New and Vivid Forms" H. L. Mencken and the American Revolution of the Word -- 2 / "Never Mind the Comical Stuff . . . . They Ain't No Joke about This!" Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and the Comic Origins of Vernacular Modernism -- 3 / "I Didn't Understand the Words, but My Voice Was Like Dynamite" Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American Break with Realism -- 4 / "Say It with Lead" Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and Modernism's Underworld Vernacular -- 5 / "The Necromancy of Language" Realist Uplift and the Urban Vernacular in Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.
Brooks Hefner shows how writers across a variety of popular genres--from Gertrude Stein and William Faulkner to humorist Anita Loos and ethnic memoirist Anzia Yezierska--employed street slang to mount their own critique of genteel realism and its classist emphasis on dialect hierarchies, the result of which was a form of American experimental writing that resonated powerfully across the American cultural landscape of the 1910s and 1920s.
9780813940427
American literature-20th century-History and criticism.