Tabla de Contenidos:
  • Introduction: slanguage: toward a theory of American vernacular modernism
  • "The steady reaching out for new and vivid forms": H.L. Mencken and the American revolution of the word
  • "Never mind the comical stuff ... they ain't no joke about this!": Ring Lardner, Anita Loos, and the comic origins of vernacular modernism
  • "I didn't understand the words, but my voice was like dynamite": Anzia Yezierska, Mike Gold, and the Jewish American break with realism
  • "Say it with lead": Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, and modernism's underworld vernacular
  • "The necromancy of language": realist uplift and the urban vernacular in Rudolph Fisher and Claude McKay
  • Conclusion: "but mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people": modernism's familial.