ABSTRACT
This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of language in relation to the subject of history. The British and American contributors put forward the idea that language is a broadly based means of communication with contested and consensual meanings, and that such meanings must be revealed and evaluated by precise historical contextualisation of language and proper attention to established rules of historical method. The essays contend that the connections between the linguistic and the social must be rethought. The book aims to move beyond the unproductive fragmentation and relativism, the narrow textual range and the literal and anti-realist readings of the postmodern ’linguistic turn’ to offer a rigorous approach to the study of language and the subject of history.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part One|54 pages
Theory
chapter Chapter Two|19 pages
Language and contestation: the case of ‘the People’, 1832 to the present
part Two|33 pages
Gender
chapter Chapter Three|16 pages
Fractured universality: the language of British socialism before the First World War
chapter Chapter Four|15 pages
‘A bit of mellifluous phraseology’: the 1922 railroad shopcraft strike and the living wage
part Three|54 pages
Community and workplace
part Four|62 pages
Labour movements