Stephen Turton (University of Oxford)

Before the Word Was Queer (eBook, PDF)

Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600 1930

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cambridge University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. März 2024
• ISBN-13: 9781009008488
• Artikelnr.: 70911890

Autorenporträt

Stephen Turton is a Research Fellow in English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He writes and teaches on the history of English, lexicography, literature, and gender and sexuality. He is the co-editor of an ongoing project to digitize the letters of James A. H. Murray, the ¿rst chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (www.MurrayScriptorium.org).

Inhaltsangabe

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.