Towards a New Representational Linguistic Paradigm: Literary Dialect in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

Realistic novelists are supposed to depict societal realities through a set of techniques and styles amongst which literary dialect has gained much interest. Its manifestation in literary texts is recorded in the British and the American popular literature. It is mainly used to verbalize and voice characters from specific class, locality and ethnicity which cannot be articulated through the Standard English. The existence of dialects in the novel is the result of the authors‘ awareness of its necessity to render their stories authentically. The use of dialect manifests as a linguistic transgression of the pre-set literary standards. Yet, literary dialect helps the reader to construct knowledge about its speakers, their speech habits and cultural performances. This research looks to examine the use of dialects and their nuances in E. Bronte‘s Wuthering Heights and Z. N. Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God. It endeavors to cover their linguistic and literary functions and the critical responses to such literary novelty.