Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Supporting your high street Find out how »
The Whole World in a Book : Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century, Hardback Book

The Whole World in a Book : Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century Hardback

Edited by Sarah (Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics, Seni Ogilvie, Gabriella (Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Safran

Hardback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias.

Especially in Eurasia and North America, especially among the middle and upper classes, people had the space, time, and energy for very long books.

More than other multi-volume nineteenth-century collections, the dictionaries, or their descendants of the same name, remain with us in the twenty-first century.

Online or on paper, people still consult Oxford for British English, Webster for American, Grimm for German, Littré for French, Dahl for Russian.

Even in spaces whose literary languages already had long philological and lexicographic traditions-Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin-the burgeoning imperialisms and nationalisms of the nineteenth century generated new dictionaries. The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways.

Newly automated technologies and systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, and advertising led to their unprecedented popularization.

Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them. In this volume, eighteen of the world's leading scholars investigate these lexicographers asking how the world within which they lived supported their projects?

What did language itself mean for them? What goals did they try to accomplish in their dictionaries?

Information

£32.99

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information