Tom Paulin Critical Essay | Critical Review by Tom Shippey

Critical Review by Tom Shippey

SOURCE: Shippey, Tom. “Tribalizing the Dialect of the Pure.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4571 (9-15 November 1990): 1198.

In the following review, Shippey praises Paulin's editorial selections in The Faber Book of Vernacular Verse, though objects to his refusal to acknowledge class and ideology, rather than aesthetics, as the basis for drawing distinctions between linguistic conventions.

Standard English, for some reason, arouses horrid passions. Some have pointed out that that is because it is seen as female: it is “pure”, but its “purity” is always under threat, if not “assault”, by those who wish to “corrupt” it. Fortunately there is never any shortage of chivalrous self-appointed rescuers to rush forward and protect it from “solecisms”, “Americanisms” and other forms of the non-Standard-English Comus-rout: though one might think it rather depressing for them to discover, every time they turn their collective back, that the language has gone and got itself glued...
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