Languages of Labour - Hardcover

'This book is an interesting addition to a growing volume of literature which provides a salutary rebuttal of postmodernist academic imperialism.' Labour History Review, Vol. 64, No. 1 '...this collection demonstrates that labour history should not be seen as trapped in a time warp of 'old fashioned' concerns...the authors...build on a long-standing interest in language and identity, pioneered by historians such as E. P. Thompson, and to develop this further by re-thinking the complex relationship between discourse, culture, political identities and socio-economic structures...Urban economic and social historians, as well as labour historians, should find plenty to interest them in this book...' Urban History, Vol. 26, No. 2

This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach to the study of language in relation to the subject of history. The British and American contributors put forward the idea that language is a broadly based means of communication with contested and consensual meanings, and that such meanings must be revealed and evaluated by precise historical contextualisation of language and proper attention to established rules of historical method. The essays contend that the connections between the linguistic and the social must be rethought. The book aims to move beyond the unproductive fragmentation and relativism, the narrow textual range and the literal and anti-realist readings of the postmodern ’linguistic turn’ to offer a rigorous approach to the study of language and the subject of history.