Work

Reinventing the Local: Neologism in William Barnes

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: At the heart of William Barnes’s best-known poetry is a set of contrasts: rural life as marked by both nostalgic inertia and fluid vitality, linguistic strangeness as both forbiddingly disorienting and tantalizingly half-familiar, speakers as both generic and idiosyncratic. Critics have tended to approach these defining issues by focusing on the poet’s use of Dorset dialect. However, I argue that they are best understood by carefully assessing not only Barnes’s regionalisms but also his overlooked neologisms. After explaining the ideological basis of this poet’s tendency to coin words, I demonstrate how his invented terms can elucidate the interlinked debates above — and, in the process, can shed new light on Barnes’s conception of his authorial identity.

Source: 19 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

DOI: 10.16995/ntn.11147

Author: Veronica Alfano

Institution: Macquarie University

Language: English

Topic: Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

OpenAlex ID: W4408168505

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Related to: 10