The 18th century was a wealth of knowledge, exploration and rapidly growing technology and expanding record-keeping made possible by advances in the printing press. In its determination to preserve the century of revolution, Gale initiated a revolution of its own: digitization of epic proportions to preserve these invaluable works in the largest archive of its kind. Now for the first time these high-quality digital copies of original 18th century manuscripts are available in print, making them highly accessible to libraries, undergraduate students, and independent scholars. Western literary study flows out of eighteenth-century works by Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Frances Burney, Denis Diderot, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and others. Experience the birth of the modern novel, or compare the development of language using dictionaries and grammar discourses. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to insure edition identification: ++++ Library of Congress W021984 Philadelphia: Printed and sold by Robert Bell, in Third Street, and Francis Bailey, in Market Street, M, DCC, LXXXIII. [1783]. xvi, 218, [6] p.; 8°

This title was first published in 2001: Although 17th- and 18th-century English language theorists claimed to be correcting errors in grammar and preserving the language from corruption, this new study demonstrates how grammar served as an important cultural battlefield where social issues were contested. Author Linda C. Mitchell situates early modern linguistic discussions, long thought to be of little interest, in their larger cultural and social setting to show the startling degree to which grammar affected, and was affected by, such factors as class and gender. In her examination of the controversies that surrounded the teaching and study of grammar in this period, Mitchell looks especially at changing definitions and standardization of "grammar", how and to whom it was taught, and how grammar marked the social position of marginal groups. Her comprehensive study of the contexts in which grammar was intended or thought to function is based on her analysis of the ancillary materials - prefaces, introductions, forewords, statements of intent, organization of materials, surrounding materials, and manifestos of pedagogy, philosophy, and social or political goals - of more than 300 grammar texts of the time. The book is intended as a landmark study of an important movement in the foundation of the modern world.