Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between
1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism:
the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally
distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S.
literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully,
painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby
rewiring both narrative form and national identity. The United
States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but efforts to
prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn
out to be a development of particular importance to interwar
modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous
'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919
when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study,
within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously
obvious and impossible. Considering the continuing presence of
fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic
multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material
implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law,
presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic
renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's
massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly
multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude
Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos,
Lionel Trilling, Americo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors
shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the
interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical
experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars.
Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological
exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than
confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that
those who speak alike are ethically and politically
likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that
were characteristically American because, not in spite, of their
synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.
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