Description
Book SynopsisLiterary Slumming: Slang and Class in Nineteenth-Century France applies a sociolinguistic approach to the representation of slang in French literature and dictionaries to reveal the ways in which upper-class writers, lexicographers, literary critics, and bourgeois readers participated in a sociolinguistic concept the author refers to as “literary slumming”, or the appropriation of lower-class and criminal language and culture. Through an analysis of spoken and embodied manifestations of the anti-language of slang in the works of Eugène François Vidocq, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, the Goncourt Brothers, and Émile Zola, Literary Slumming argues that the nineteenth-century French literary discourse on slang led to the emergence of this sociolinguistic phenomenon that prioritized lower-class and criminal life and culture in a way that ultimately expanded class boundaries and increased visibility and agency for minorities within the public sphere.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Literary Slumming in Nineteenth-Century France
Prologue: Slang as Premodern Anti-Language
Chapter 1: Slang as Criminal Code
Chapter 2: Slang as Embodied Language
Chapter 3: Slang as Language Politics
Chapter 4: Slang as the Language of Misery
Chapter 5: Slang as the Language of Parisians
Chapter 6: Slang as the Language of Whores
Epilogue: Literary Slumming Across Cultures
