Before the Word was Queer

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.

Author: Stephen Turton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/21/2024
Pages: 350
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.40lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.81d
ISBN: 9781316518731

About the Author
Turton, Stephen: - 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 first chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (www.MurrayScriptorium.org).