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BOOK EXAMINES LANGUAGE OF WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
ROLLA, Mo. -- The career of author William Dean Howells followed a circular path, from its roots in romanticism through realism and back to romanticism, and the study of the language in his works illustrates this evolution, says Greg Stratman, adjunct assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri-Rolla and the author of a new book on Howells.
Stratman's book, "Speaking for Howells: Charting the Dean's Career Through the Language of His Characters," was published in 2001 by University Press of America Inc. in Lanham, Md.
Stratman, who also serves as academic coordinator of the UMR Applied Language Institute, first began researching Howells in graduate school as part of a course on the study of the literary dialect of several writers of the period.
Howells wrote short stories, novels, plays, poetry, campaign literature and hundreds of editorials, and had thousands of letters published, says Stratman. In addition, he served as editor of several different journals including The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. He was very involved in the literary climate of his day. "Everyone who was anyone in the field of literature from 1870 to 1910 Howells knew personally or corresponded with," Stratman says.
Although he isn't widely read today, Howells was a prolific author. "He was widely read during his lifetime, especially in his prime," says Stratman. "But after he died in 1920, he quickly became viewed as an anachronism and has been largely ignored by the reading public since the 1930s. However, his critical reputation has rebounded during the last decade or so."
Howells has been credited with introducing and encouraging realism in literature. He believed literature should reflect the language itself. According to Stratman, Howells was influenced in his writing by the works of American romanticists like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, but he reacted against their works, believing they needed to be more realistic -- both in the events of the story and the language of the characters. "Howells believed literature should be a reflection of real life," says Stratman. "He felt the subject matter in the works of Hawthorne and Poe was too fantastic, too unbelievable, too unreal."
The characters in Howells' works frequently speak in dialect. Social dialects, ethnic dialects and geographical dialects are all evident in the speech patterns of his characters. Stratman tracked the frequency of words that indicate dialect to determine the dialect density.
By studying the dialect density, Stratman determined Howells' use of dialect was initially infrequent, became more evident during the middle years of his career and decreased again in the later works. "That illustrates the path of his career," Stratman says. "In his early career, Howells was still influenced by romanticism. The dialect density increased in the middle when he was focused on realism, and got smaller toward the end of his career, when reminiscences of his youth precipitated a return to romanticism."
Stratman's book is available from the publisher at www.univpress.com.
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