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 »
Before the Word was Queer : Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930, Hardback Book

Before the Word was Queer : Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930 Hardback

Hardback

Out of stock

Description

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 ?rst standalone English dictionary to the completion of the ?rst 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 scienti?c 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.

Information

£105.00

Out of stock
Add to Basket
Sign in to add to wishlist
 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information