The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century
Sarah Ogilvie, Gabriella Safran
The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, & social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Newly automated technologies & systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, & advertising led to their unprecedented popularization. Dictionaries in the 19th century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages & lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language & literature of the nation-state; & sites of innovative authorship where middle & lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, & missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated & understood the world around them.
In this volume, 18 of the world's leading scholars investigate these lexicographers asking how the world within which they lived supported their projects? What did language itself mean for them? What goals did they try to accomplish in their dictionaries?