Modernism: Keywords

Modernism: Keywords presents a series of short entries explaining the diverse and often contradictory meanings of words used with frequency and urgency in “written modernism.” Spanning the “long” modernist period (from about 1880 to 1950), this work aims not to define the era’s dominant “beliefs,” but to highlight and expose its salient controversies and changing cultural thought. Guided by the cultural lexicography developed by Raymond Williams in his groundbreaking work, Keywords (1976), the entries here focus on words with unstable meanings and conflicting definitions, tracking disparities to capture pivotal matters of discussion and debate. By selecting keywords that the modernists were utilizing themselves, and by drawing from a broad and eclectic range of writings, Modernism: Keywords illuminates a path to restoring the language of the modernist period to its life in the public sphere of its time.

Melba Cuddy–Keane is Emerita Professor, University of Toronto–Scarborough and Emerita Member of the Graduate Department of English, University of Toronto. Her publications include Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere (2003), the annotated edition of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (2008) and, previously with Blackwell, contributions to The Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) and The Companion to Narrative Theory (2005). Adam Hammond is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria, Canada. His publications include “The Honest and Dishonest Critic” on Mikhail Bakhtin and Erich Auerbach in Style (2012), and an essay on James Baldwin and the New Criticism in Rereading the New Criticism (2012). Alexandra Peat is Assistant Professor of Literature at Franklin College, Switzerland. She is the author of Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (2010).