The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature by Michael North (Professor of English, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles)
The Dialect of Modernism describes the crucial role of racial masquerade and linguistic imitation in the emergence of literary modernism. Revolting against the standard language, modernists reimagined themselves as racial aliens and mimicked the strategies of dialect speakers. At the same time, African-American writers struggled to free themselves from dialect as it had been rendered by white dialect writers.