Skip to main content
  • Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

    Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages


How does our understanding of nineteenth-century literature and culture change when we attend more closely to the four nations’ multilingual past and present? To address this question, we present a selection of the work shared as part of the AHRC-funded research network Victorian Literary Languages. In 2022 and 2023 the network brought together scholars of literature, history, and language(s) to develop new perspectives on the intersections between language and literature during a century that radically redrew the linguistic maps of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. This issue of 19 explores how literature across the long nineteenth century imagined and presented the relations between the languages of Britain and Ireland, and how literary writing questioned, reflected, and contributed to the sociolinguistic developments that marginalized (and continue to marginalize) languages other than English. It also considers literature’s role in campaigns to preserve and revive linguistic diversity. Our contributors present close analyses of texts that work to codify and disrupt linguistic hierarchies; that interrogate evolutionary narratives of linguistic development (and decline); and that shed light on the creative possibilities of authors’ engagement with linguistic plurality in its richly varied forms. The research we share here participates in ongoing efforts to redefine the parameters of nineteenth-century studies — in the context of the four nations and across the globe — and seeks to encourage further comparative research into the intertwined histories of literature and language.

Cover Image: ‘Map of Scotland, showing the present limits of the Gaelic Tongue, and the chief dialectical divisions of the Lowland Scotch’ (detail), from James Murray, The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland: Its Pronunciation, Grammar, and Historical Relations; with an Appendix on the Present Limits of the Gaelic and Lowland Scotch, and the Dialectical Divisions of the Lowland Tongue (Philological Society, 1873). Reproduced with kind permission of University Collections, University of St Andrews. 

Editors: Karin Koehler (Guest Editor), Gregory Tate (Guest Editor)

Introduction


Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages: Politics, Aesthetics, and Print Culture

Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages: Politics, Aesthetics, and Print Culture

Karin Koehler and Gregory Tate

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Articles


‘This queer hieland glen’: Multilingualism and Translocal Identification in Thomas Pringle’s African Farm Poems

‘This queer hieland glen’: Multilingualism and Translocal Identification in Thomas Pringle’s African Farm Poems

Lars Atkin

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

‘Voicing the Text’: ‘Speakers’, Speakers, and the Performative Anthology

‘Voicing the Text’: ‘Speakers’, Speakers, and the Performative Anthology

Lynda Mugglestone

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

‘Who wrote this script?’: Pickwick in Stepney

‘Who wrote this script?’: Pickwick in Stepney

Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

‘Gooin t’ schoo’: The Subject of Adult Education in Dialect Poetry from the Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861–65

‘Gooin t’ schoo’: The Subject of Adult Education in Dialect Poetry from the Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861–65

Simon Rennie

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Georgic at Home in Nineteenth-Century Dialect Poetry

Georgic at Home in Nineteenth-Century Dialect Poetry

Sue Edney

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Reinventing the Local: Neologism in William Barnes

Reinventing the Local: Neologism in William Barnes

Veronica Alfano

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Language Evolution, Literary Craft, and Aesthetic Mysticism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Theory of Style

Language Evolution, Literary Craft, and Aesthetic Mysticism in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Theory of Style

Will Abberley

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Free Indirect Speech Containing Welsh English Literary Dialect and Various Non-Standards in Anna Maria Bennett’s Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel

Free Indirect Speech Containing Welsh English Literary Dialect and Various Non-Standards in Anna Maria Bennett’s Ellen, Countess of Castle Howel

Starlina Rose

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Margaret Oliphant’s Phantom Scots

Margaret Oliphant’s Phantom Scots

Katerina García-Walsh

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

‘McAndrew, come awa’!’: Scots and Imperial Gothic in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’

‘McAndrew, come awa’!’: Scots and Imperial Gothic in Rudyard Kipling’s ‘McAndrew’s Hymn’

Paolo D‘Indinosante

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Màiri?: Nineteenth-Century Gaelic Song, Rewilding, and Audience Creation

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Màiri?: Nineteenth-Century Gaelic Song, Rewilding, and Audience Creation

Peter Mackay

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages

Afterword

Afterword

Ruth Livesey

2025-05-02 Issue 37 • 2025 • Nineteenth-Century Literary Languages