The Whole World in a Book: Dictionaries in the Nineteenth Century

Nineteenth-century readers had an appetite for books so big they seemed to contain the whole world: immense novels, series of novels, encyclopaedias. Especially in Eurasia and North America, especially among the middle and upper classes, people had the space, time, and energy for very long books. More than other multi-volume nineteenth-century collections, the dictionaries, or their descendants of the same name, remain with us in the twenty-first century. Online or on paper, people still consult Oxford for British English, Webster for American, Grimm for German, Littré for French, Dahl for Russian. Even in spaces whose literary languages already had long philological and lexicographic traditions-Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin-the burgeoning imperialisms and nationalisms of the nineteenth century generated new dictionaries.The Whole World in a Book explores a period in which globalization, industrialization, and social mobility were changing language in unimaginable ways. Newly automated technologies and systems of communication expanded the international reach of dictionaries, while rising literacy rates, book consumption, and advertising led to their unprecedented popularization. Dictionaries in the nineteenth century became more than dictionaries: they were battlefields between prestige languages and lower-status dialects; national icons celebrating the language and literature of the nation-state; and sites of innovative authorship where middle and lower classes, volunteers, women, colonial subjects, the deaf, and missionaries joined the ranks of educated white men in defining how people communicated and understood the world around them.In this volume, eighteen 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?

Table of Contents:
Introduction Sarah Ogilvie and Gabriella Safran 1. The Unfinished Business of Eighteenth-Century European Lexicography John Considine 2. Foreign Interests: Nineteenth-Century Lexicography in Russia and Japan Brian Kim 3. The Lexical Object: Richardson's New Dictionary of the English Language (1836-1837) Michael Adams 4. A Nineteenth-Century Garment Throughout: Description, Collaboration, and Thorough Coverage in the Oxford English Dictionary (1884-1928) Sarah Ogilvie 5. Between Science and Romanticism: The Deutsches Wörterbuch of the Brothers Grimm Volker Harm 6. Joost Halbertsma and the Lexicon Frisicum Anne Dykstra 7. The First Scottish 'National' Dictionary: John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1808/1825) Susan Rennie 8. French Lexicography in Québec: The Works and Ideas of Oscar Dunn Wim Remysen and Nadine Vincent 9. Christian Nationalism in Noah Webster's Lexicography Edward Finegan 10. The Invention of the Modern Dictionary: Webster's Unabridged of 1864 Peter Sokolowski 11. Lord of the Words: Vladimir Dahl's Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great-Russian Language as a National Epic Ilya Vinitsky 12. Lexicography of the Entrenched Empire: Banihûn's and Pu-gong's Manchu-Chinese Literary Ocean (1821) Mårten Söderblom Saarela 13. Steingass's Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary and the Rise and Fall of Persian as a Transregional Language Walter Hakala 14. Sharper Tools: Missionary Women's Lexicography in Asia Lindsay Rose Russell 15. Dialect Jokebooks and Russian-Yiddish and English-Yiddish Dictionaries Gabriella Safran 16. Dictionaries of Libras from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century: Historical Continuities and Persistent Challenges Jorge Bidarra and Tania Aparecida Martins

About the Author :
Sarah Ogilvie is Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics and at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, where she is also Director of the Dictionary Lab. Her publications include Words of the World: A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2013). Gabriella Safran is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Eva Chernov Lokey Professor in Jewish Studies at Stanford University. She works in Russian and Yiddish literatures in the 19th and 20th centuries, and is the author of Rewriting the Jew: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (2000) and Wandering Soul: The Life of S. An-sky (2010).

Review :
"The broad linguistic (and geographic) scope of the volume enables such a comprehensive overview and constitutes its distinct advantage." -- Anna Dziemianko, Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan, Studia Anglica Posnaniensia