Overview

Obsolete old words from seventeenth-century English villages reflect the realities of working-class life, exhausting labor, dirt, bizarre foods, magic, horses, outrageous sexism, feudal duties. New words, first appearing in print 1650-1800, reflect a middle-class culture very different from an earlier courtly culture, interested in money, coffee-houses, and self-fulfillment. The book contains chapters on pre-industrial and middle-class culture, the scientific revolution, and semantic change. They give strong evidence that new words and the new senses of old words played a key role in the British Enlightenment, its links with quantification and natural science, its tendencies towards reorganization and democracy, its redefinitions and revitalizations of women's roles, social stereotypes, the public sphere, and the very concepts of individualism, sociability, and civilization itself.

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9789004429093

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Reviews

The idea that language not only reflects but also shapes culture forms the basis of Carey McIntosh's study of words and cultural change in Britain from the middle of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries [...]. Semantics and Cultural Change in the British Enlightenment makes for a very stimulating read and, one hopes, inspires more work of this kind. Claudia Claridge, University of Augsburg. In: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 60, No. 4 (2021), pp. 999-1000.

Author Information

Carey McIntosh, Ph.D. (1964, Harvard University), is Professor of English Emeritus at Hofstra University. He has published books and articles on Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century language, literature, and style, including The Evolution of English Prose 1700-1800 (Cambridge, 1998).

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