Logomotives : Words 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.

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.