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  • Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words

    Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words by Mugglestone, Lynda;

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    Product details:

    • Publisher OUP Oxford
    • Date of Publication 6 September 2018

    • ISBN 9780198830689
    • Binding Paperback
    • No. of pages304 pages
    • Size 216x138x17 mm
    • Weight 378 g
    • Language English
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    Short description:

    This book looks at the range of Johnson's writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography. It casts new light on Johnson's life in language provides a convincing reassessment of his impact on English culture, the making of dictionaries, and their role in a nation's identity.

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    Long description:

    Popular readings of Johnson as a dictionary-maker often see him as a writer who both laments and attempts to control the state of the language. Lynda Mugglestone looks at the range of Johnson's writings on, and the complexity of his thinking about, language and lexicography. She shows how these reveal him probing problems not just of meaning and use but what he considered the related issues of control, obedience, and justice, as well as the difficulties of power when exerted over the 'sea of words'. She examines his attitudes to language change, loan words, spelling, history, and authority, describing, too, the evolution of his ideas about the nature, purpose, and methods of lexicography, and shows how these reflect his own wider thinking about politics, culture, and society. The book offers a careful reassessment of Johnson's lexicographical practice, examining in detail his commitment to evidence, and the uses to which this might be put.

    Dictionary-making, for Johnson, came to be seen as a long and difficult voyage round the world of the English language. While such images play their own role in lexicographical tradition, Johnson would, as this volume explores, also make them very much his own in a range of distinctive, and illuminating, ways. Johnson's metaphors invite us to consider-and reconsider-the processes by which a dictionary might be made and the kind of destination it might seek, as well as the state of language that might be reached by such endeavours. For Johnson, where the dictionary-maker might go, and what should be accomplished along the way, can often seem to raise pertinent and perhaps troubling questions.

    Lynda Mugglestone's generous, wide-ranging account casts new light on Johnson's life in language and provides an engaging reassessment of his impact on English culture, the making of dictionaries, and their role in a nation's identity.

    This is a fascinating study of Johnson, which reopens areas of investigation that have long since seemed closed. This is a book for students of Johnson or the eighteenth century at any level.

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    Table of Contents:

    Preface
    List of figures
    Journeys into Words
    Writing the Dictionary: Departures and destinations
    'Excursions into books': Documenting the new world of words
    The Ordered State: Power, authority, and the written word
    Meaning, governance, and the colours of words
    Defending the Citadel, patrolling the borders
    History and the flux of time
    The praise of perfection
    Appendix: 1755 - 1773
    Notes
    References
    Index

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