Just out this month, reviews by me of two smart and interesting books about dictionaries: Craig Dworkin’s Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography (review in Dictionaries) and Stephen Turton’s Before the Word Was Queer: Sexuality and the English Dictionary 1600-1930 (review in Review of English Studies).
These two very different books are both about dictionaries /and…/ – modernist poetry in one case, and societal constructions of sexuality in another. You could say that, whatever the difference in topic matter, one book is mainly interested in people (here poets) reading the dictionary, while the other is mainly in interested in dictionaries “reading” the conceptual landscape of their times, though both books also take an interest in the reciprocal orientation.
Here are a couple of the more tendentious reactions I had to the authors’ accounts of such crossways reading and rereading.
First in response to the welcome provocations of Dictionary Poetics:
And regarding what I think are some of the larger implications behind the specific topic focus of Before the Word Was Queer:
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