Writing a War of Words: Andrew Clark and the Search for Meaning in World War One

ISBN-13: 9780198870159 / Angielski / Twarda / 2022 / 368 str.

Lynda Mugglestone

Recenzje

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.

O autorze

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).