Online Talk: The Art of English Dialect Literature
Date 27 January 2026 19:00 - 20:30
Location Online talk
Speaker Alex Broadhead
The Art of English Dialect Literature
A Folklore Society Online Talk by
Alex Broadhead (University of Liverpool)
Tuesday 27 January 2026, 19:00 GMT
People study the dialect literature of this period for a variety of reasons. Because its emergence happened at the same time as the standardisation of English, it has much to tell historical linguists about a crucial period in the story of the language. For dialectologists, it provides a detailed – if not always dependable – account of how people spoke in different regions, and how they expressed their own local identities. Literary scholars, on the other hand, may read in early dialect literature a striking counternarrative to more traditional versions of the history of English literature. And, finally, the worlds represented in early dialect literature provide social historians with rich evidence of how labouring-class and middle-class communities lived between the early and the late modern periods.
In this talk, however, I make a case for the pleasure of reading early dialect literature – a case which is dependent on recognising the value of this body of work as art, in addition to but independent of its historical importance or cultural significance. That is to say, I am interested in the extent to which early dialect literature can be understood as a creative and a poetic endeavour, and the ways in which analysing its language can help to throw this into relief.
Alex Broadhead is Senior Lecturer in English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of two books: The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology and Identity (Bucknell University Press, 2014) and The Language of Early English Dialect Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
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