CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Slippery Words, 1760-1830’.

Offers of papers are invited for a two-day conference on the historical 
semantics of the period 1776-1832, to be held at the University of Glamorgan on 
July 8th and 9th, 2004. 

In an age of revolution the meanings of many important words 
(including ‘revolution’) were transformed. Words acquired new meanings while 
retaining or losing older meanings. Meanings altered in ways that were often 
elusive. The period was remarkable for semantic innovation, complexity, play, 
contention, obfuscation and confusion. The tradition of enquiry associated with 
William Empson’s Structure of Complex Words (1951) and Raymond Williams’s 
Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1976) has drawn heavily on the 
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Williams’s first keyword –
 ‘culture’ – started to acquire its modern meanings in this period, while 
Austen and Wordsworth were the principal sources, along with Shakespeare, for 
Empson’s influential discussion of ‘sense’. More recently, literary scholars 
have traced the fortunes of famously slippery words such as ‘imagination’ 
and ‘enthusiasm’ in the volatile political circumstances of the British 1790s. 
Historians have focussed on alterations in the language of social 
classification: the term ‘class’ itself, and ‘Britain’, together 
with ‘family’, ‘friend’ and ‘servant’. Meanwhile, everyone working on the 
period continues to depend on the collective labour of the Oxford English 
Dictionary.

The conference will explore the ways in which these words functioned within 
texts and within society. Papers are invited - from literary scholars, 
historians, philosophers and others – on any aspect of the conference theme. 
Specific questions which might be addressed include: What were the pressures 
which gave birth to new meanings? What was the relationship between semantic 
and other kinds of social change? Were the shifts of meaning in specific 
English words echoed in neighbouring languages such as French and Welsh? What 
happened to the vocabularies of natural and social description when they were 
transported, with their users, from one part of the globe to another? Were the 
extraordinary achievements of poetry in this period connected to the unusually 
polysemic environment in which everybody may have been living? 

Papers will last twenty minutes. Abstracts (250 words) should be sent to Gavin 
Edwards, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Glamorgan, 
Pontypridd CF37 1DL or emailed to [log in to unmask]

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