"Dialect and Dichotomy introduces and critiques canonical works in literary dialect analysis and covers recent, innovative applications of linguistic analysis to representations of African American dialect in American literature. It also proposes theoretical principles and specific methods that can be implemented in order to analyze literary dialect for either linguistic or literary purposes, or both. Finally, the proposed methods are applied in four original analyses of African American speech as represented in major works of fiction of the American South - Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Charles W. Chestnutt's The Conjure Woman, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God."--BOOK JACKET.