Overview

Writing a War of Words is the first exploration of the war-time quest by Andrew Clark - a writer, historian, and volunteer on the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary - to document changes in the English language from the start of the First World War up to 1919. Clark's unique series of lexical scrapbooks, replete with clippings, annotations, and real-time definitions, reveals a desire to put living language history to the fore, and to create a record of often fleeting popular use. The rise of trench warfare, the Zeppelinophobia of total war, and descriptions of shellshock (and raid shock on the Home Front) all drew his attentive gaze. The archive includes examples from a range of sources, such as advertising, newspapers, and letters from the Front, as well as documenting social issues such as the shifting forms of representation as women 'did their bit' on the Home Front. Lynda's Mugglestone's fascinating investigation of this valuable archive reassesses the conventional accounts of language history during this period, recuperates Clark himself as another 'forgotten lexicographer', challenges the received wisdom on the inexpressibilities of war, and examines the role of language as an interdisciplinary lens on history.

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9780198870159

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Reviews

Sheridan, whose book spans the whole history of Hong Kong, in contrast to the others' focus on recent events, is the most even-handed of the three authors. He not only examines the views of Hong Kongers and the British but also analyses with a wealth of documentary evidence the motivations of Chinese leaders in seeking to reverse historical humiliations, including the 19th century opium wars that inflicted a wound on the Chinese psyche that has yet to heal. * Victor Mallet, Times Literary Supplement * The voluminous diaries and scrapbooks Andrew Clark compiled during World War One prove him alert to words and usage of the time and a skilled and prescient commentator on their significance. In her new book, Lynda Mugglestone reconstructs Clark's account of the 'war of words' amidst the war, his finger, as she puts it, 'on the pulse of words in time', equally an apt description of Mugglestone's historical touch. Anyone with an interest in the history of English, the Great War, or the Oxford English Dictionary, to which Clark contributed, must read Writing a War of Words. * Michael Adams, Indiana University Bloomington * Lynda Mugglestone's Writing a War of Words is a revelation. It tells the story of Andrew Clark, a diarist and philologist whose reflections on language and the Great War offer a wealth of information about English linguistic history and its social contexts. But more generally, it reveals the centrality of the Great War to the study of the English Language itself. Much has been made of Tolkien's war and its impact on his philology and fantasy. Clark is different: he is a personal, self-reflective writer, an acute observer of words and people, and a historian of the imagination. His diary is a true discovery, and Professor Mugglestone shows him standing on a par with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Writing a War of Words will stand with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory as a lasting, revisionary account of early twentieth-century personal writing, language change, and the wartime literary imagination. * Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego *

Mugglestone has a shrewd understanding of the technical business and psychological climate of lexicography. Her research is scrupulous, and through her analysis Clark's catalogue of usage comes to seem an achievement of almost Johnsonian proportions - each page a time capsule, and the whole project an extraordinarily detailed map of the period's changing langscape ... a generous tribute to his [Clark's] linguistic curiosity and curatorial intelligence. * Henry Hitchings, Times Literary Supplement * The voluminous diaries and scrapbooks Andrew Clark compiled during World War One prove him alert to words and usage of the time and a skilled and prescient commentator on their significance. In her new book, Lynda Mugglestone reconstructs Clark's account of the 'war of words' amidst the war, his finger, as she puts it, 'on the pulse of words in time', equally an apt description of Mugglestone's historical touch. Anyone with an interest in the history of English, the Great War, or the Oxford English Dictionary, to which Clark contributed, must read Writing a War of Words. * Michael Adams, Indiana University Bloomington * Lynda Mugglestone's Writing a War of Words is a revelation. It tells the story of Andrew Clark, a diarist and philologist whose reflections on language and the Great War offer a wealth of information about English linguistic history and its social contexts. But more generally, it reveals the centrality of the Great War to the study of the English Language itself. Much has been made of Tolkien's war and its impact on his philology and fantasy. Clark is different: he is a personal, self-reflective writer, an acute observer of words and people, and a historian of the imagination. His diary is a true discovery, and Professor Mugglestone shows him standing on a par with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Writing a War of Words will stand with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory as a lasting, revisionary account of early twentieth-century personal writing, language change, and the wartime literary imagination. * Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego *

The voluminous diaries and scrapbooks Andrew Clark compiled during World War One prove him alert to words and usage of the time and a skilled and prescient commentator on their significance. In her new book, Lynda Mugglestone reconstructs Clark's account of the 'war of words' amidst the war, his finger, as she puts it, 'on the pulse of words in time', equally an apt description of Mugglestone's historical touch. Anyone with an interest in the history of English, the Great War, or the Oxford English Dictionary, to which Clark contributed, must read Writing a War of Words. * Michael Adams, Indiana University Bloomington * Lynda Mugglestone's Writing a War of Words is a revelation. It tells the story of Andrew Clark, a diarist and philologist whose reflections on language and the Great War offer a wealth of information about English linguistic history and its social contexts. But more generally, it reveals the centrality of the Great War to the study of the English Language itself. Much has been made of Tolkien's war and its impact on his philology and fantasy. Clark is different: he is a personal, self-reflective writer, an acute observer of words and people, and a historian of the imagination. His diary is a true discovery, and Professor Mugglestone shows him standing on a par with Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. Writing a War of Words will stand with Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory as a lasting, revisionary account of early twentieth-century personal writing, language change, and the wartime literary imagination. * Seth Lerer, University of California, San Diego *

Author Information

Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Her research explores language history, language change and attitudes, and lexicography from the eighteenth century onwards, as well as on the history of pronunciation and its social and cultural framing. She is the author of the OUP volumes Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (2nd ed., 2007), Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (2011), and Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (2015), and editor of The Oxford History of English (2nd ed., 2012).

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