SOURCE: "'Kipper of de Vineyards,'" in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIV, No. 8, May 7, 1987, pp. 38-41.

[Spears is an American educator and critic. In the review below, he favorably assesses Brooks's The Language of the American South, noting his concern with the significance of language in the interpretation of literature.]

That Cleanth Brooks, after a long and distinguished career as a literary critic, should now produce a book about language may surprise some readers. But it must be remembered that language was one of his strong early interests: among his first publications were The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain (1935) and "The English Language of the South" (1937, often reprinted). Besides, he is concerned here not with language for its own sake, but with its larger significances and particularly its relation to literature.

An innocent reader might easily take this...