The Dialect of the Tribe Speech and Community in Modern Fiction [Hardcover]

The bold careers of Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett--writers with profoundly unsettled cultural identities--spark Margery Sabin's investigation of values carried through inherited forms of speech.The Dialect of the Tribeoffers fresh readings of such great novels asThe Golden Bowl,Women in Love,Ulysses, and the Beckett trilogy which illustrate how complex attitudes toward the speech forms of language inform the most varied social, psychological, and aesthetic structures in modern fiction. Sabin explores the powerful tension in these writers between appreciation for the resources of common speech in English and contrary longings for a freedom associated with abstraction, system, and foreign or private language. Her own critical procedures transcend restrictive and reductive polarizations, as she lucidly analyzes the biases of both the Anglo-American critical tradition and the challenge to that tradition in French literary theory and practice. Written in a jargon-free, accessible style,The Dialect of the Tribeargues that the ambiguous cultural positions of the great modern novelists in English emerge as a major source of their strength--the rich traditions of the English language give enlivening power to writers also remarkable for their drive toward radical independence and skepticism.

[An] often brilliant study. --D.H. Lawrence Review

Margery Sabin is a critic of rare lucidity and brilliance, andThe Dialect of the Tribeshould redirect and enrich our reading of modern fiction. --Richard Poirier,Rutgers University

Splendid insights on every page....Sabin in a sensitive, thoughtful critic...Brilliant. --The D.H. Lawrence

The book is impressive, the work of a formidable critic. --James H. Maddox,George Washington University

An intelligent study of language play in the composition and detection of attil“+