Languages of the Night

Download or read book Languages of the Night written by Barry McCrea and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-03-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars – such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language – caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Seán Ó Ríordáin in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.