Introduction • “Mere Mutilation”: Becoming Literate in Dialect Poetry
Chapter One • The Difficulty of Dialect Poetry
Anthologizing Dialect Poetry
Marketing the Mass Poet
Performing Dialect Poetry
Silent Reading and Silent Film
Dialect and the Phonograph
Chapter Two • Plain and Peculiar Dialects: Bret Harte and James Whitcomb Riley
Voicing Harte’s Truthful James and Ah Sin
Riley’s Child Writing
The Spelling Bee Poem
Chapter Three • Lettered Dialect: Paul Laurence Dunbar I
Dunbar’s Performances
The Epistolary Dialect Poem
Dunbar’s Class in Spelling and Reading
The Spelling Bee Poem Redux
Chapter Four • Cultivated Dialect: Paul Laurence Dunbar II
The Ease and Labor of Dialect Poetry
The Commerce of Magazine Verse
Dialect, Advertising, and the Century
The Cultivation of Dialect Performance
Chapter Five • Gendered Dialect: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Maggie Pogue Johnson
Harper’s Aunt Chloe and Her Literacy
Femininity, Fashion, and Dialect
Johnson’s Education and Idleness
Chapter Six • Annotated Dialect: Claude McKay and Langston Hughes
From Showman to Spokesman: The Unlettered Poet
Hughes’s Typography
Hughes’s Marginal Literacy
McKay’s Dialects and Poetic Diction
Conclusion