Introduction

The nineteenth century witnessed a proliferation and elaboration in the literary uses of dialect beyond anything seen before. The study of literary dialect stands on the cusp between several different disciplines, most notably dialectology and literary criticism, but also history of the English language, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics and folklore. Attempts to formalise the study of literary dialect were not particularly apparent until North American scholars began to take a philological - historical approach to fictional dialect representation as authentic linguistic data. George Philip Krapp opens up the field with his pioneering article, "The Psychology of Dialect Writing". Krapp finds evidence of some authentic attempts to portray region-specific dialects, and concedes that 'they have some foundation in reality', but he is dismissive of much dialect literature. Nevertheless, his essay opened the way for future work in the field, and set the terms for much future debate.