Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century by Daniel DeWispelare (review)

As anyone who has perused the MLA Job Information List in the last few years will have noticed, the term “Anglophone” has begun to appear quite frequently in ads for tenure track jobs in English departments; it usually describes literature written after 1900, but has increasingly come to be applied to earlier periods, as scholars continue to demonstrate the heterogeneity of English not only in its native spaces but also as a result of global trade and expansion. This term also tends to accompany challenges to the history of English as primarily the history of what we have come to call “Standard English,” a phrase that originated in the nineteenth century as attempts to standardize the language gained momentum. (The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first usage to 1836.) With Multilingual Subjects: On Standard English, Its Speakers, and Others in the Long Eighteenth Century, Daniel DeWispelare sets his sights a bit earlier, aiming to fill in the history of Anglophone language and literature, and imploring us to “be able to see not only that the term ‘English’ language is insufficient . . . but also that the insufficiency of this term is a lived condition that generates descriptive texture and narrative momentum” (2). DeWispelare seeks to repair this insufficiency by bringing the notion of “anglophony” (11) to the study of the long eighteenth century. In addition to arguing for this shift in terminology, the book proposes that tensions between Anglophone and Standard English are themselves responsible for linguistic development, treating “linguistic multiplicity and linguistic difference as centers of eighteenth-century aesthetic and political concern” (7).

Organized in a manner not unlike that of The Stories of English (2004) by David Crystal—a book that also challenges “the standard story” (3), though not one that appears in DeWispelare’s bibliography—Multilingual Subjects contains five chapters and six interludes. In contrast to the chapters, which are organized thematically, the interludes treat various “multilingual subjects,” or anglophone speakers and writers. These case studies comprise an impressive range of examples, from the text of an advertisement placed by George Washington requesting the return of several fugitive slaves, to the romanticized story of Dorothy Pentreath and the demise of the Cornish language, to the syllabary developed by Sequoyah in the early nineteenth century. These sections contain some of the more lucid writing in the book, and I often wondered what this monograph would have been like if DeWispelare had allowed these multilingual voices to guide the text, rather than rerouting them to the channels between the main chapters. The interludes do much to demonstrate the generative potential for which DeWispelare argues in the introduction, and are less encumbered by summaries of critical theory or scholarly history than the chapters themselves.

Chapter 1 draws on Derrida to explore “the politics of monolingualism,” especially as it manifests itself in fugitive slave advertisements (41). In the closing pages of the chapter, DeWispelare shifts to aesthetic questions, pairing Robert Burns and Phillis Wheatley, who together “occupy polar ends of a spectrum of possible aesthetic responses to linguistic imposition” (59). Here Wheatley’s poetry receives a close reading, whereas Burns is discussed mostly in terms of the book trade and contemporary reception of his work. Given the larger themes of this book, it is surprising that DeWispelare does not offer insight into the specific language of Burns’s poetry and the ways in which it represents—or doesn’t—some aspect of anglophony. Chapter 2 reads eighteenth-century multilingualism through the work of Jacques Rancière, with special attention to the implications of claims about the “copiousness” of the English language by early advocates of standardization. In Chapter 3, DeWispelare considers translation, exploring the meaning of such terms as “slavish” or “servile” and “free” or “liberal” when used by translators and their readers to discuss the process of bringing a text from one language to another. This chapter in...