The Sound of William Barnes's Dialect Poems
3. Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect, third collection (1862)
by T L Burton
FREE | 2017 | E-book (PDF) |Â 978-1-925261-58-5 | 456 pp
DOI:
This series, developed from Tom Burton’s groundbreaking study, William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (The Chaucer Studio Press, 2010), sets out to demonstrate for the first time what all of Barnes’s dialect poems would have sounded like in the pronunciation of his own time and place. Every poem is accompanied by a facing-page phonemic transcript and by an audio recording freely available from this website. The free PDF includes links to the audio files as well.
This book is the third volume of a series. See Volume 1 and Volume 2.
About the author
is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the ³ÉÈË´óƬ, where he taught for nearly forty years. He is the author of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (The Chaucer Studio Press, 2010), and co-editor, with K. K. Ruthven, of The Complete Poems of William Barnes, 3 volumes (Oxford University Press). He has spoken on Barnes at several international conferences and at more than two dozen universities in the UK, USA, and Australia, and has put on readings from Barnes’s poems at four Adelaide Fringe Festivals (2009–2012).
Review
From reviews of Volume 1 of The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems
This volume is the first of a series designed to supplement Burton’s William Barnes’s Dialect Poems: A Pronunciation Guide (2010) ... Together, these volumes constitute a monumental project which ‘sets out to provide a phonemic transcript and an audio recording of each individual poem in Barnes’s three collections of Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect’ ...
The driving force behind this project is Burton’s enthusiasm for Barnes’s work and his desire to bring these poems to life for the widest possible audience ... Recordings of Burton’s lively, animated and accurate readings of each poem are provided on a free website hosted by Adelaide University Press, as is a free, searchable pdf version of the text ...
The Sound of William Barnes’s Dialect Poems can ... be used by those without access to the Pronunciation Guide; so the pdf version effectively constitutes a free, comprehensive guide to Barnes’s pronunciation, something for which both the author and the publisher are to be applauded.
Joan C. Beal in Anglia