The Language of the People: Scots Prose from the Victorian Revival - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0080377300 ISBN 13: 9780080377308

Publisher: Mercat Press, 2002

Synopsis

If the textbooks were right, this volume would contain nothing but empty pages; because the medium in which its authors' wrote i.e., discursive Scots prose became extinct more than two hundred years before any of them were born. So writes Dr. William Donaldson in his introduction. Historians of Scots language and literature, he says, have claimed that the vernacular prose tradition died out during the early seventeenth century, to be used thereafter for the demotic chatter of lower-class characters in the novels of Scott and Stevenson; that the language was irretrievably damaged by its long and losing battle with the forces of Anglicization; that it became, except perhaps for various experiments with synthetic forms during the present century, intrinsically unfit for serious purposes. The Language of the People presents evident to the contrary. The Scots language had not declined; not, at least, in its spoken forms which continued to be the language

About this title

About the Author

William Donaldson is a Scottish social historian and piper. Two of his earlier books, The Jacobite Song and Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland, received a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Thomas Blackwell Memorial Prize.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mercat Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0080377300
• ISBN 13: 9780080377308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Donaldson William