Afterword

This Afterword argues that the history of literary languages in the long nineteenth century is one of conflict between a desire for local authenticity and the global extension of a standardizing anglophone culture. It suggests that the articles on literary languages in this issue of 19 foreground three key themes that each flourish within different literary genres. First, dialect literature is embodied in vernacular and dialect poetics during the period. Second, literary dialect is intertwined in the forms of the Romantic historical novel and its heirs in regional Gothic fictions. Third, the process of unwriting and rewriting colonial narratives in alternate, resistant literary languages is registered in a range of textual formations across the century and into the present. The Afterword situates George Eliot’s Middlemarch in the context of this tension between linguistic standardization and global mobility. It concludes that the articles in this issue are part of a broader — and hope-filled — scholarly argument that the diversity of literary languages in Britain now should be a story of rich opportunities not of deficit.