LogomotivesWords That Change the World, 1400–1700

Animates the conversional potential of language by exploring the catalytic force of words across diverse cultures and linguistic systems

• Offers new and exportable methodologies for the study of words and their world making and unmaking capacities
• Challenges what constitutes a ‘keyword’ itself by attending to the cultural and epistemological work performed by prefixes, prepositions, and noun-phrases
• Intervenes in the critical histories of Renaissance humanism, colonialism, imperialism, race and racial formation, sexuality, embodiment, slavery, disability, affect, and philology
• Individual chapters focus on literary works such as Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Sonnets, and The Tempest, Marlowe’s Edward II, Puttenham’s The Art of English Poesy, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the medieval lyric The Wanderer, Dafydd ap Gwilym’s Moliant Llewelyn ap Gwilym, Erasmus’s The Sileni of Alcibiades, Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzān, and more

Logomotives are words that change worlds – past, present, and future. Bearing a wide range of linguistic, regional and disciplinary expertise, the volume’s twenty-five contributors traverse multiple geographies (Asia, Africa, Iberian Peninsula, Europe, and the Americas), work across fifteen languages and span from antiquity to our current moment to reveal how words are catalysts of cultural, political and epistemological change. Harnessing new developments in philologies of race, in queer-, feminist-, trans-, transnational- and postcolonial philologies, as well as translation studies, Logomotives illuminates the world-making capacity of words. Each chapter opens with a methodological statement, pursues a central reading and concludes with a lesson plan for undergraduate or graduate classrooms. The volume orients critical attention to the relations between what a word means, the ways in which it moves, and the changes that such motion engenders, both within and across the historical cultures under analysis and in present-day scholarship.