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.
• 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
