Brewer, Professor Charlotte

Job Title: Professor of English Language and Literature, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: Hertford
Period/ Subject: Medieval, Language

Email address: charlotte.brewer@hertford.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I began my research career as a medievalist, with publications on the late Middle English poem Piers Plowman and its textual and editing history, e.g. Piers Plowman: the Z Version (ed. with A. G. Rigg, Toronto, 1983) and Piers Plowman: the Evolution of the Poem (Cambridge University Press, 1996; reprinted 2006).  I retain Middle English research interests but for the moment I am working on the history and character of the Oxford English Dictionary. Much of this research can be seen on my website Examining the OED.

Three of my current projects explore OED’s coverage of individual authors and periods, its consequent influence on literary and linguistic history, and its treatment of areas of language relating to culture and society (e.g. politics, sex & gender, usage and correctness):

1.    Shakespeare’s word-coining: how many words did Shakespeare contribute to the language, and how did he compare with his contemporaries? (in collaboration with my Shakespearian colleague Emma Smith).

2.    ‘New words’ in Jane Austen and in 18c and 19c female writers; the language of Walter Scott. This work grows out of a Leverhulme-funded study of OED’s quotation of 18c female writers, which found that women tended to be quoted not for usage exemplifying linguistic (and poetic) norms, but for domestic and household vocabulary and for otherwise unusual words (e.g. the first example of a word’s use, or rare or unique language); for more information see Examining the OED web-pages and an accompanying article. Scott—the second most quoted individual writer in the OED, often for archaicisms and Scottish dialect words—is a valuable comparator, full of independent lexical interest. 

3.    Dictionaries and Society 1850 to the present (book on four topics: Literature and language; Jews, politics and culture; Lesbians in the dictionary; Right and wrong language).

I am also beginning work on a joint venture, with Debbie Cameron of Oxford and Jürg Schwyter of Lausanne, investigating BBC language policy & ideology 1922-1945 (as witnessed by archival records in Caversham); and with Barry Windeatt of Cambridge I’m editing a collection of essays on major topics in Middle English studies related to the work of my late uncle Derek Brewer (A modern medievalist: traditions and innovations in the study of medieval literature, to be published by Boydell and Brewer).

Teaching Areas:

Graduate Teaching and Supervision

Oxford University is introducing a new MSt course on English Language from October 2012 and I am delighted to be one of the five language specialists in the Faculty who will be teaching on this. The course will cover a range of different areas, including lexicography, and any interested candidates should contact the English Faculty Office for more information.

Undergraduate

Old and Middle English; the English Language.

Recent Publications:

BOOK
Treasure-House of the Language: the Living OED, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2007

ARTICLES IN PEER-REVIEWED JOURNALS/CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS

--‘Shakespeare, word-coining, and the OED’, forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey

 --‘“Goose-quill or Gander’s”? Female writers in Johnson’s Dictionary’, forthcoming in Johnson’s Pendulum, ed. Freya Johnston and Lynda Mugglestone, Oxford University Press 

--‘Shakespeare and the OED’, forthcoming in the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia, ed. Bruce Smith et al 

--‘Dictionary-making, usage, literature and the classics: the unhappy fate of Oxford’s Quarto dictionary 1925-1958’, in Codification, canons, and curricula, ed Ulrich Busse, Ralf Schneider, and Anne Schröder (Aisthesis Verlag: Bielefeld), forthcoming  (revised version of ‘The Oxford Quarto Dictionary’ below)

--'"Happy Copiousness"? OED's recording of the language of female authors of the eighteenth century', forthcoming in Review of English Studies. Available on Oxford Journals site here

--'Prescriptivism and descriptivism in the first, second and third editions of OED', English Today 26 (2010): 24-33

--'The Use of Literary Quotations in the OED’, Review of English Studies 61 (2010), 93-125. Available on Oxford Journals site here

--‘The OED as “literary instrument”: its treatment past and present of the vocabulary of Virginia Woolf’, Notes & Queries (2009) 56, 430-44. Available on Oxford Journals site here

--'The Oxford English Dictionary's treatment of female-authored sources of the eighteenth century', in Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Wim wan der Wurff (eds.), Current Issues in Late Modern English, Peter Lang, Bern, 2009, 209-38

-- Bio-critical accounts of W. W. Skeat and R. W. Burchfield for Lexicon Grammaticorum, H. Stammerjohann (ed.), Walter de Gruyter, Berlin & New York, 2009, 231-2 & 1405-6

--'The Oxford Quarto Dictionary', Henry Sweet Society Bulletin 51 (2008), 25-40

--'The Oxford English Dictionary Supplements', in A. Cowie, ed, Oxford History of Lexicography, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008, 260-78

--'Johnson, Webster, and the Oxford English Dictionary', in H. Momma and M. Matto, ed., Blackwell Companion to the History of the English Language, Blackwell, Oxford, 2008, 113-121

--'Pronouncing the P: Prescription or Description in English 19th- and 20th-century dictionaries?', Historiographia Linguistica 2/3 (2007), 257-80

--'Reporting Eighteenth-Century Vocabulary in the Oxford English Dictionary', in John Considine, ed., Words and Dictionaries from the British Isles, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007, 104-129

-'Eighteenth-Century Quotation Searches in the Oxford English Dictionary', in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX), ed. R. W. McConchie et al. Somerville, MA, Cascadilla, 2006, 41-50

--'Authority and Personality: Usage Labels in the Oxford English Dictionary, Transactions of the Philological Society 103 (2005), 261-301

--Women and the Archive: the representation of gender in the Dictionary of National Biography and the Oxford English Dictionary', article written jointly with Elizabeth Baigent and Vivienne Larminie, Archives (Journal of the British Records Association) xxx no. 113 (2005), 1-23

-- ‘Critical, Scientific and Eclectic Editing of Chaucer’, in Interstices: Studies in Middle English and Anglo-Latin Texts in Honour of A.G. Rigg, ed. Richard Firth Green and Linne R. Mooney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 15-43

--‘OED Sources’, in Lynda Mugglestone, ed, Lexicography and the Oxford English Dictionary: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 40-58; reprinted 2002

 

Other Information:

I have been a tutorial fellow at Hertford College since 1990, working half-time from 1998 to 2004 to look after my three children. After completing my eighteenth-century research I hope to develop a project on dictionaries and society in the 20th century.

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