Toward a Reassessment of Edward Eggleston's Literary Dialects

Abstract

In the history of American language and literature Edward Eggleston has a secure reputation both as an important regional novelist of the nineteenth century and as a remarkably enlightened amateur linguist. Although none of Eggleston's novels have ever been widely acclaimed by elitist literary critics, his first novel, The Hoosier School-Master, was an instant popular success when it was first serialized in Hearth and Home magazine in 1871, it has had continuous popularity now for over a century,l and it is regularly on the required reading lists of college courses devoted to the American novel.2 The popularity of the book stems in part from its regional realism, but without question the most important aspect of The Hoosier SchoolMaster is Eggleston's use of dialect. Writing in the preface to the 1892 library edition of the book, Eggleston correctly observed that The Hoosier SchoolMaster was "the file-leader of the procession of American dialect novels" in the 1870's and 80's.3 Eggleston's chief critic and biographer, William Randel, also stressed the importance of the use of dialect in The Hoosier SchoolMaster: