- 352 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
About this book
Bringing together research from queer linguistics and lexicography, this book uncovers how same-sex acts, desires, and identities have been represented in English dictionaries published in Britain from the early modern to the inter-war period. Moving across time – from the appearance of the first standalone English dictionary to the completion of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary – and shuttling across genres – from general usage, hard words, thieves' cant, and slang to law, medicine, classical myth, women's biography, and etymology – it asks how dictionary-writers made sense of same-sex intimacy, and how they failed or refused to make sense of it. It also queries how readers interacted with dictionaries' constructions of sexual morality, against the broader backdrop of changing legal, religious, and scientific institutions. In answering these questions, the book responds and contributes to established traditions and new trends in linguistics, queer theory, literary criticism, and the history of sexuality.
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Information
Subtopic
LinguisticsTable of contents
- Cover
- Half-title page
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Charting the Sexual and Lexical Outlands
- 1. Legislating Acts: The Limits of Buggery, Sodomy, and Copulation
- 2. Estranging English: The Centre of the Language and the Queer Frontier
- 3. Silencing Sex: Social Propriety and Lexical Censorship
- 4. Dissecting Matter: Odd Bodies in Medical Dictionaries
- 5. Taxonomizing Desire: Science and Sexuality in the Oxford English Dictionary
- Conclusion: Looking beyond the Queer and Now
- Appendix I: Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary
- Appendix II: Same-Sex Definitions in Dictionaries, 1604–1933
- References
- Index
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Yes, you can access Before the Word Was Queer by Stephen Turton in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over 1.5 million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.