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2 - Estranging English

The Centre of the Language and the Queer Frontier

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2024

Stephen Turton
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

This chapter considers how English dictionaries made sense of sexuality beyond modern English society. It begins with the early modern assumption that a nation’s character was commensurate with its language, and that the moderate nature of England’s language and culture entailed that any ‘excess’ found in either must be the result of foreign influence. The chapter examines how sodomy and buggery, along with the semantic field of pederasty, were positioned by etymological, general, and hard-word dictionaries as ethically and ethnically remote, vices practised in the Mediterranean by ancient heathens or modern heretics. These xenophobic associations remained in dictionaries into the nineteenth century. Conversely, lexicographers’ retellings of classical myths of same-sex love—male and female—reveal sites of tension between the moderns’ veneration of Greek and Roman literature and their rejection of its pagan sensuality. The life of Sappho in particular provoked sharp disagreements over what her moral character had been, and what could or should be said about it, in a range of dictionary genres: hard-word, general, classical, and biographical.

Type
Chapter
Information
Before the Word Was Queer
Sexuality and the English Dictionary, 1600–1930
, pp. 56 - 83
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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  • Estranging English
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.003
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  • Estranging English
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.003
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Estranging English
  • Stephen Turton, University of Oxford
  • Book: Before the Word Was Queer
  • Online publication: 14 March 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009006804.003
Available formats
×