About this book

For twenty-five years, the Language, Discourse, Society series has been at the forefront of multidisciplinary studies, publishing books on topics ranging from biology to aesthetics, sociology to literary criticism, philosophy to art history. The Language, Discourse, Society Reader offers a representative selection of material from those books to give a valuable overview of the work of the series. That work has been concerned both with formal analysis and historical explanation, with both social theory and the study of language, and concerned with showing the necessary interrelations of the separate disciplines for the understanding of the complex reality of different objects of study. The title of the series was, and is, the recognition of this: language, discourse and society are to be grasped together in an interdependence and interaction within which they are neither to be held separate nor run into one another regardless of their specificity. The founding ambition of the series, as the Editors make clear and examine in their introduction to the Reader, was to argue for and develop such an approach. It is that argument and that development which this Reader sets out and exemplifies.