This course investigates the politics of language standardization in literature and culture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. English was under construction, from its littlest parts (i.e. debates over the placement of prepositions in English sentences) to the 'character' of English as a national language to the negotiations between 'dialects' and a standard English that was far from settled. Together we'll ask how discussions about language and grammar are often underwritten by stakes that are racial, gendered, classed, and--in particular--imperial. What competing versions of English were alive in the long eighteenth-century (1650-1830)? How did imaginative literature construe the diversity of the language and its speakers, and on other other, work to consolidate a governing standard? How did Welsh, Irish, Scottish dialects, as well as English Creole languages and French, interact with and challenge the 'Standard English' that was under construction? Our key readings will be drawn from Samuel Johnson, Tobias Smollett, Olaudah Equiano, Anna Barbauld, Walter Scott, Robert Burns, William Wordsworth, Hester Thrale Piozzi, Jane Austen, and others. We will also ask how these issues continue to be contentious in discussions of African American English (AAE), sociolinguistics, and global anglophone literature. (Poetry, Fiction, 1650-1830)