Cassedy’s Figures of Speech is framed as a “recovery project…[for] a lost disciplinary moment when language served as a framework for understanding selves and a tool for refashioning selves” (5). It focuses on six unique late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century linguistic figures, five of whom are men closely connected with the study and teaching of languages: Nicolas Gouin du Fief, a refugee of the French Revolution and author of a well-known series of French textbooks; Duncan Mackintosh, a Scottish-Caribbean type designer; Noah Webster, inventor of the phonetic alphabet and author of the canonical Blue Back Speller (New York, 1824) and a well-known dictionary; John Gilchrist, British chronicler of Indian sub-continent languages and developer of a universal alphabet that pre-dated the international phonetic alphabet; and Edmund Fry, another type designer and author of Pantographia (London, 1799), a compilation of language samples from around the world. The sixth figure is an indigent...

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