A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries

A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries
Author: Julie Coleman
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008-11-20
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0191565253

The second volume of Julie Coleman's entertaining and revealing history of the recording and uses of slang and criminal cant takes the story from 1785 to 1858, and explores their manifestations in the United States of America and Australia. During this period glossaries of cant were thrown into the shade by dictionaries of slang, which now covered a broad spectrum of non-standard English, including the language of thieves. Julie Coleman shows how Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue revolutionized the lexicography of the underworld. She explores the compilation and content of the earliest Australian and American slang glossaries, whose authors included the thrice-transported James Hardy Vaux and the legendary George Matsell, New York City's first chief of police, whose The Secret Language of Crime: The Rogue's Lexicon informed the script of Martin Scorcese's film Gangs of New York. Cant represented a tangible danger to life and property, but slang threatened to undermine good behaviour and social morality. Julie Coleman shows how and why they were at once repellent and seductive. Her fascinating account casts fresh light on language and life in some of the darker regions of Great Britain and the English-speaking world.

Edinburgh History of the Scots Language

Edinburgh History of the Scots Language
Author: Jones Charles Jones
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 2019-07-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1474469639

This is the first full scale attempt to record the diachronic development of this important English language variety and includes extensive essays by some of the foremost international scholars of the Scots language. The book attempts to provide a detailed and technical description of the syntax, phonology, morphology and vocabulary of the language in two main periods: the beginnings to 1700 and from 1700 to the present day. The language's geographical variation both in the past and at the present time are fully documented and the sociolinguistic forces which lie behind linguistic innovation and its transmission provide a principal theme running through the book.WINNER of the Saltire society/National Library of Scotland Scottish Research Book of the Year Award

Garner's Modern American Usage

Garner's Modern American Usage
Author: Bryan A. Garner
Publisher: Oxford University
Total Pages: 930
Release: 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195161912

Painstakingly researched with copious citations from books, newspapers, and news magazines, this new edition has become the classic reference work praised by professional copy editors.

A Source Book for Irish English

A Source Book for Irish English
Author: Raymond Hickey
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2002-01-01
Genre: English language
ISBN: 9789027237538

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "all the bibliographical items in this book ... along with self-installing software necessary to process the databases and tha annotations on a personal computer." -- p. [535].

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture

The Uncanny in Language, Literature and Culture
Author: Sarah Stollman
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2024-09-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1036405303

In his attempts to define the uncanny, Sigmund Freud asserted that the concept is undoubtedly related to what is frightening, to what arouses dread and horror. Yet the sensation is prompted, simultaneously, by something familiar, establishing a sense of insecurity within the domestic, even within the walls of one’s own home. This disturbance of the familiar further unsettles the sense of oneself. A resultant perturbed relationship between a person and their familiar world — the troubled sense of home and self-certainty — can be the result of a traumatic experience of loss, and of unresolved pasts resurfacing in the present. Memory traces are revised and interwoven with fresh experiences producing an uncanny effect. As “an externalization of consciousness”, the uncanny becomes a meta-concept for modernity with its disintegration of time, space, and self. The papers in this book seek to explore the representations of the uncanny in language, literature, and culture, applying the origins of the concept to a range of ideas and works.

Castle Rackrent (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)

Castle Rackrent (International Student Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
Author: Maria Edgeworth
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2016-04-04
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0393614654

The only edition of this 1800 novel—widely regarded as the first historical novel—to include supporting materials on both the importance of Maria Edgeworth as a writer and the influence of contemporary history on this novel. Castle Rackrent’s publication in 1800 signaled many firsts: the first historical novel, the first regional novel in English, the first “big house” novel, the first Anglo-Irish novel, and the first novel with a narrator who is neither reliable nor part of the action. This Norton Critical Edition is based on the Baldwin & Cradock edition that appeared as part of an eighteen-volume collected edition titled Tales and Novels of Maria Edgeworth (1832–33). It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations. Ryan Twomey focuses the volume’s “Backgrounds and Contexts” on Edgeworth’s importance as a writer, the influence of contemporary historical events on her writing (most importantly, the Act of Union of 1800, which united Ireland and Great Britain), and Castle Rackrent’s impact on the development of the novel. These include a selection of Edgeworth’s letters; five major contemporary reviews; biographical pieces; Sir Walter Scott on Edgeworth and her response to him; and excerpts from Edgeworth’s juvenilia, The Double Disguise. “Criticism” is thematically organized to give readers a clear sense of Castle Rackrent’s major themes: Irish writing and specifically the Irish novel, narrative voices, patriarchy and paternalism, and Edgeworth’s Hiberno-English writing. Contributors include Seamus Deane, Marilyn Butler, Katherine O’Donnell, Julia Nash, Joyce Flynn, and Brian Hollingworth, among others. A chronology of Edgeworth’s life and work and a selected bibliography are also included.

Race and the Rise of Standard American

Race and the Rise of Standard American
Author: Thomas Paul Bonfiglio
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2010-12-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110851997

This study examines the effect of race-consciousness upon the pronunciation of American English and upon the ideology of standardization in the twentieth century. It shows how the discourses of prescriptivist pronunciation, the xenophobic reaction against immigration to the eastern metropolises- especially New York - and the closing of the western frontier together constructed an image of the American West and Midwest as the locus of proper speech and ethnicity. This study is of interest to scholars and students in linguistics, American studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, and studies in race, class, and gender.