Mugglestone, Professor Lynda

Job Title: Professor of the History of English, Times Lecturer, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Pembroke
Period/ Subject: Language

Email address: lynda.mugglestone@pmb.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I am currently in the final stages of completing (with Dr Freya Johnston of St. Anne’s) a co-edited collection of essays on Samuel Johnson  by a range of international contributors. Johnson’s Pendulum  will be published by Oxford University press in 2012. My other major project is a book-length study of Johnson’s dictionary, Samuel Johnson and the State of Language, While Johnson is often prototypically seen as a writer who laments the state of language,  the book takes as its own point of departure the interrelated metaphors of language as nation, and as lexicography as a potentially perilous journey through ‘this vast sea of words’, to which Johnson  -- along with a range of earlier lexicographers --  often has recourse. Johnson’s ‘state of language’ is thereby both a point reached, as well as a journey of discovery completed along with the dictionary – a domain which sets out its spatial territories of provincial and polite, its social hierarchies of low and barbarous, cant and commerce, its history, and its mode of governance, not least in terms of the problems of democracy and dictatorship, and Johnson’s sense of the ‘suffrage’ of words.  

Other on-going projects include the further exploration of linguistic prescription and description in dictionaries (to be included in the Oxford Handbook of Lexicography ed. Philip Durkin OUP, 2013), and a chapter on collections and catalogues (which  focuses on the acts of collection, selection, and memorialization which can underpin projects such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias (as well as other genres of reference book). This will form part of the Blackwell Companion to British Literature ed Robert De Maria, Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zucker. A further topic, to be explored in a plenary paper in Finland in 2012, is that of the lexicographer and the life of words, which will focus on the appropriation of biography as metaphor within lexicographical writing and practice. Longer term is the organization of an international conference on Johnson and Shakespeare in 2015 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication of Johnson’s edition of  Shakespeare.
 

Teaching Areas:

Old English
Middle English
History of English 1400-present day

Co-convenor of the new M.St. in English Language which begins in 2011.

Recent Publications:

Books and Edited Collections (2000 ---)
Lexicography and the OED. Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).  Pp.x +288. ISBN: 0-19-823784-7 Revised paperback edition 2002.

Talking Proper. The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol
Revised and extended 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003)  0-19-925061-8;

Lost for Words. The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary. Yale University Press, 2005.
(ed.) The Oxford History of English. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Paperback edition, Sept 2008.

Talking Proper. The Rise and Fall of the English Accent as Social Symbol Revised and extended pbk edition (Oxford University Press, Sept 2007)

The Oxford History of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; Revised paperback edn 2008).

Book Chapters (2000--)

‘Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest’: The New English Dictionary’, in L. C. Mugglestone, Lexicography and the OED. Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (Oxford, 2000, 2002), 1-21.

‘An Historian and Not a Critic’: The Standard of Usage in the OED’. In L. C. Mugglestone, Lexicography and the OED. Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (Oxford, 2000, 2002), 189-206.

'’Proper English' and the Politics of Standard Speech'. British Cultural Studies: An Introduction ed. D. Morley and K. Robins and (Oxford University Press, 2001), 181-194.

‘Prescribed Conflicts. James Murray and the Writing of the OED’. In K. Lentz  and R. Mohlig (eds.) Of Dyuersitie & Change of Language: Essays Presented to Manfred Gorlach on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Heidelberg: C. Winter Universitatsverlag, 2002 pp.157-168.

‘Proof and Process: The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary’. In Insights into Late Modern English  (eds.)  Charles Jones, Maurizio Gotti, Maria Dossena. Peter Lang, 2003, pp. 107-130.

‘Departures and Returns. Writing the English Dictionary in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’. In The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition eds. F. O’Gorman and K. Turner. London: Ashgate, 2004, pp.144-162.

‘Sheridan in the Schoolroom’. In F. Austin and C. Stray (eds.). The Teaching of English in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Essays for Ian Michael on his 88th Birthday.  (2003). Pp.22-28.

‘A History of the English Language?’. In L.C. Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English (OUP, 2006, 2008), pp.1-6.

‘English in the Nineteenth Century’. In L.C. Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English (OUP, 2006, 2008), pp.274-304.

‘Accent as Social Symbol’. In Changing English eds. D. Graddol. D. Leith, J. Swann, M. Rhys, J. Gillen (London: Routledge, 2007), 153-78.

'The Indefinable Something'. Taboo and the English Dictionary', in Rude Britannia ed. M. Gorji (London: Routledge, 2007), 22-32. 

 ‘The Rise of Received Pronunciation’. In M. Matto and H. Momma (eds.), Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language. (Oxford: Blackwells, 2008): 243-250. 

‘The Oxford English Dictionary; 1857-1928’. In A. Cowie (ed.), The Oxford History of Lexicography. 2 vols. (OUP, 2008). pp.

‘BBC English. In the Beginning’. In: Schwyter, Jürg Rainer; Maillat, Didier; Mair, Christian (eds). Broadcast English. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 33, G. Narr, Tübingen (2008): 197-215.

‘‘Living History’ – Andrew Clark, the OED, and the language of the First World War’. In I. Tieken Boon van Ostade and  W. van der Wurff (eds.), Current Issues in Later Modern English. Peter Lang (2009): 229-249.

‘Registering the language -- dictionaries, diction, and the art of elocution'. In R. Hickey (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English : Ideology and Change. Cambridge University Press (2010), pp.309-338.

‘Benjamin Smart and Michael Faraday; The Principles and Practice of Talking Proper in Nineteenth-Century England’. Forthcoming in M. Adams and A. Curzan (eds.) Contours of English and English Language Studies: In Honor of Richard W. Bailey. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press

‘The Oxford English Dictionary’. Forthcoming in Die großen Lexika Europas (Great European Lexicons: European Dictionaries and Encyclopaedias) ed. U. Hass. Mouton de Gruyter.

 ‘“The Illusions of History”: Words in Time and the OED’. Forthcoming in G. Iamartino and M. Sturiale (eds) English Words in Motion Polimetrica International Scientific Publisher. (2011)

 ‘Received Pronunciation’. Forthcoming in  A. Bergs and L. Brinton (eds.), Historical Linguistics of English, Mouton de Gruyter (2011).

 ‘The OED and the Victorian Novel’.  Forthcoming in L. Rodensky (ed.). The Oxford Companion to the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 ‘Johnson’s Dictionary’. Forthcoming in J. Lynch, Johnson in Context (CUP, 2011)

 ‘Patriotism, Empire, and Cultural Prescriptivism: Images of Anglicity in the OED’. Forthcoming in Multilingual Matters.

Articles (2000--)

 
'Labelling revisited. The Problems of Objectivity and the OED'. Dictionaries, vol.21, 2000, pp.27-36. ‘Prescription in Dictionaries’. In R. Mesthrie (ed.), The Concise Encyclopaedia of Sociolinguistics (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 2001), 672.
‘Politics and English Dictionaries’. In M. Keith Booker (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of  Literature and Politics 3 vols. (London: Greenwood Press, 2005), Vol.I, pp.203-4. 
‘Metrosexual and other Blends’. The English Review, vol.15 (2005), 28-30.
‘John Walker’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed). Ed. K. Brown. Oxford: Elsevier (2006). Vol.13, p.508.

‘Thomas Sheridan’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed). Ed. K. Brown. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006. Vol.11, p.278 ISBN 0-08-044299-4
‘Academies Laying Down a Standard through Their Dictionaries’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed). Vol.1, 12-14. Ed. K. Brown. Oxford: Elsevier, 2006.
‘‘Decent Reticence’: Coarseness, Contraception, and the First Edition of the OED’. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America (2007): 1-22.
‘Samuel Johnson the Undergraduate’, Transactions of the Johnson Society (2008), 5-11.

‘The Dictionary as Watch’ . The New Rambler. Journal of the Johnson Society of London, 2007-8. [2010], pp.70-77.

Other Information:

I am currently completing Dictionaries: A very Short Introduction for OUP and working on projects exploring Johnson and eighteenth-century language, as well as on the language of the first world war.

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