The thirty essays in this volume trace how the tangentiality of English and other modes of language affects the production of English literature, and investigate how questions of linguistic "code" can be made accessible to literary analysis. This collection studies multilingualism from the Reformation onwards, when Latin was an alternative to the emerging vernacular of the Anglican nation; the eighteenth-century confrontation between English and the languages of the colonies; the process whereby the standard British English of the colonizer has lost ground to independent Englishes (American, Canadian, Indian, Caribbean, Nigerian, or New Zealand English); the interaction between English and a range of British language varieties including Welsh, Irish, and Scots, the Lancashire and Dorset dialects, as well as working-class idiom; Chicano literature; translation and self-translation; Ezra Pound's revitalization of English in the Cantos; and the psychogrammar and comic dialogics in Joyce's Ulysses.