Language, History and Class
1. Edition March 1991
332 Pages, Softcover
Wiley & Sons Ltd
This book is an investigation of how societies have understood and described themselves. It is concerned both with the history of language and the language of history. The chapters include studies of societies in Germany, China, USA and India, pre-revolutionary France and 19th-century Britain and America. The author examines how political declarations and manifestos relate to the societies from which they emanated and for which they aimed to legislate. Words such as "liberty" and "equality" have to be understood in a limited sense in the French and American revolutions, but it would be impossible to understand these events without recourse to these resonant concepts. The essays in this book explore the difficulties and the possibilities in understanding language as historical evidence
Estates, degrees, and sorts: changing perceptions of society in Tudor and Stuart England / K. Wrightson
Hidalgo and pechero: the language of 'estates' and 'classes' in early-modern Castile / I.A.A. Thompson
Definitions of nobility in seventeenth-century France / R. Mettam
Class by name and number in eithteenth-century Britain / P.J. Corfeild
The emergence of 'society' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany / J.V. Melton
From gentlemen to the residuum: languages of social description in Victorian Britain / G. Crossick
'To each a language of his own': language, culture, and society in colonial India / D. Washbrook
The language of representation: towards a Muslim political order in nineteenth-century India / F. Shaikh
Chinese views of social classification / P.A. Kuhn
Languages of power in the United States / D.T. Rodgers and S. Wilentz
Language and interpretation: Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities / W. Downes