This book argues that the sudden decline of old rural vernaculars - such as French patois, Italian dialects, and the Irish language - caused these languages to become the objects of powerful longings and projections that were formative of modernist writing. Sean O Riordain in Ireland and Pier Paolo Pasolini in Italy reshaped minor languages to use as private idioms of poetry; the revivalist conception of Irish as a lost, perfect language deeply affected the work of James Joyce; the disappearing dialects of northern France seemed to Marcel Proust to offer an escape from time itself. Drawing on a broad range of linguistic and cultural examples to present a major reevaluation of the origins and meaning of European literary modernism, Barry McCrea shows how the vanishing languages of the European countryside influenced metropolitan literary culture in fundamental ways.
