Available Formats
Household Words: Bloomers, Sucker, Bombshell, Scab, Nigger, Cyber
By (Author) Stephanie Smith
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
1st January 2006
United States
Tertiary Education
Non Fiction
427.973
Hardback
264
Looking in detail at words that "treat people as things, and things as people, and do so at that strange space where joking, ridiculing, demeaning, oppressing, resisting, and regretting converge," this book is a study of how certain words act as indices of political and social change, perpetuating anxieties and prejudices even as those ways of thinking have been seemingly resolved or overcome by history.
Stephanie A. Smith is associate professor of English at the University of Florida and the author of Conceived by Liberty: Maternal Figures and Nineteenth-Century American Literature as well as three novels.