My dissertation, Literary Slumming, is a comprehensive study of argot speakers (les argotiers) in modern French literary culture and looks at the various ways in which upper-class authors, lexicographers, and literary critics participated in a kind of second-degree "slumming" through the appropriation and manipulation of criminal and popular culture in written texts. Relying on concepts within sociolinguistics and cultural anthropology in addition to literary history and theory, I focus on the various social types who spoke argot in memoirs, large serialized novels, and dictionaries. I argue that writers, including novelists and journalists, both exoticized and manipulated argot, thus paving the way for creative work beyond the rigid prescriptivism of French linguistic surveillance. In so doing writers opened literary representation to underrepresented social figures such as criminals, women from the working class as well as minority racial and ethnic groups.

Argot speakers took forms that were just as unconventional as the language itself, offering new social categories and the possibility of a voice, in spite of the ideological and moral agenda of authors, literary critics, and censors. This attempt to capture the meaning and creativity of the oral practices of evolving social types resulted in an evolution of the language itself from the criminal code of a seedy underworld in early works such as Eugene Francois Vidocq's Memoires de Vidocq (1828), Balzac's Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes (1838-47), Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris (1842--43) to language of the people in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862) and the Parisian vernacular of low-class prostitutes in late-nineteenth century texts like the Goncourt Brothers' Germinie Lacerteux (1865) and Emile Zola's Nana (1880).

Literary Slumming provides new scholarship on the creative outlets that came about due to a bourgeois interest in sub-culture and thus, acted as a gateway for minorities to gain cultural and social validation.