Love it or hate it, the exclamation mark has been with us from Beowulf to the spam email - an enthusiastic history for language lovers!
Florence Hazrat is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, studying the bracket in early modern literature. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews, where she researched refrains in the sixteenth century. She is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, a folk fiddler, and the host of a podcast about dots and dashes.
Enjoyably mischievous ... an invitation to shrug off the
prescriptions of the language police and reawaken a sense of
wonder
*Times Literary Supplement*
Fascinating ... carries a punch
*The Week*
In 150-odd pages, Hazrat examines the [exclamation] mark's origins
in the Middle Ages, its journeys in and out of literary fashion,
its use in Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, its
career in advertising and comics and its apotheosis in the social
media age with Donald Trump's screamer showers on Twitter
*The Times*
Accessibly written, with an academic flavour, and will attract
nervous punctuators ... [Hazrat]is firmly on the side of the !,
preferring language's "contradictory carnival of meaning" and
"joyful jungle" to the "vitriol against exclamation marks [that]
abounds in grammars and style guides". As an historian of
punctuation, Hazrat must have read many inflexible guides. Who can
blame her for loving the liberated !?
*Fortean Times*
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