Date:  Tue, 1 Apr 1997 10:06:49 -0500
From:  Elizabeth Gibbens <gibbens[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]NYTIMES.COM>
Subject: Re: Query

Dear Professor Salmons:

    I don't have a direct answer for you, but Claudia Tate in the George
Washington University English Department is a good person to ask. She is a
scholar of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African-American
literature and serves on the editorial board of _The Journal of American
Literature_. The telephone number of the GW English Dept. is (202) 994-6180.

                    Elizabeth Gibbens

At 06:32 AM 4/1/97 -0500, you wrote:
>A grad student in our department (Cordelia Scharpf) is starting to work on
>some fiction written here and abroad in German by Mathilde Franziska Anneke,
>an abolitionist and early feminist leader. Much of the work deals with
>slavery. Anneke's representation of African-American speech owes much to
>English literary works of the time, but contains other elements as well.
>Some of these are Anglicisms, some stereotypical foreign talk and so on.
>
>Can anybody recommend good recent work on the representation of African-
>American speech in 19th c. literature? Has anything at all been done on
>this topic using literature in languages other than English?
>
>Thanks,
>joe salmons
>jsalmons[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]facstaff.wisc.edu 
>
>
Elizabeth Gibbens
Research Assistant
Mr. William Safire, The New York Times

-----------------------------

Date:  Tue, 1 Apr 1997 09:34:39 -0600
From:  "Timothy C. Frazer" <mftcf[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]UXA.ECN.BGU.EDU>
Subject: Re: Query

On Tue, 1 Apr 1997, Joseph C. Salmons wrote:

A grad student in our department (Cordelia Scharpf) is starting to work on
> some fiction written here and abroad in German by Mathilde Franziska Anneke,
> an abolitionist and early feminist leader. Much of the work deals with
> slavery. Anneke's representation of African-American speech owes much to
> English literary works of the time, but contains other elements as well.
> Some of these are Anglicisms, some stereotypical foreign talk and so on.
>
> Can anybody recommend good recent work on the representation of African-
> American speech in 19th c. literature? Has anything at all been done on
> this topic using literature in languages other than English?

1. In a recent biography of Sojourner Truth (Princeton UP), it states that
many of her speech were reproduced in the press in a "mock southern"
dialect, even though she spent her life in New York state and spoke Dutch
as a first language. This suggests that there was a stereotype tradtion
for representing VBE in lit.

2. There might be something in the history of minstrelsy. A book called
"Blacking Up" has been recommended to me but I haven't gotten around to
reading it yet.