Speaking the Social Body : Language-Origins and Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution
This article considers the political implications of Victorian language-study for Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution (1837) (reprinted and edited by K.J. Fielding and David Sorensen (Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1989)). I investigate how Carlyle responded to the scientific study of language with what he termed a ‘bodied word’, a reading of language based in the word-become-flesh or the doc