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“The Poe Test: Global English and The Gold Bug”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2019

Michael Malouf
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Abstract

This essay examines the production of Global English through literary texts by examining three adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug” in the 1930s by competing figures in the vocabulary control movement—Harold Palmer, Michael West, and C. K. Ogden—leaders in the formation of the field of applied linguistics. The first part of the essay explains the colonial origins of the vocabulary word list and its ascendant value in the interwar period for the new discipline of applied linguistics, and as part of the competition for English language textbooks. This leads to an analysis of these three simplifications of Poe’s story that demonstrates how the language politics in Poe’s story provides a structure through which to express a nascent Global English ideology regarding race, vernacular, and auxiliary languages.

Keywords

Global Englishvocabulary controlauxiliary languagesPoecolonial readers
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 35 - 49
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019

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References

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33 Palmer, The Grading and Simplifying of Literary Material. Emphasis mine.

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