Guided by the historical semantics developed in Raymond Williams' pioneering study of cultural vocabulary, Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries on words used with frequency and urgency in written modernism, tracking cultural and literary debates and transformative moments of change.
Short-listed for The Modernist Studies Association 2015 Book Prize for an Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection
- Highlights and exposes the salient controversies and changing cultural thought at the heart of modernism
- Goes beyond constructions of plural modernisms to reveal all modernist writing as overlapping and interactive in a simultaneous and interlocking mix
- Draws from a vast compilation of more than a thousand sources, ranging from vernacular prose to experimental literary forms
- Spans the long modernist period, from its incipient beginnings c.1880 to its post-WWII aftermath
- Approaches English written modernism in its own terms, tempering explanations of modernism often derived from European poets and painters
- Models research techniques based on digital databases and collaborative work in the humanities