Modernism Keywords

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

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).

Credits and Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Unsettling Modernism x

Note on References xviii

A

Advertising 1

Atom, Atomic 6

Avant-Garde 11

B

Best Seller 15

Bigness, Smallness 20

Biography, New Biography 26

C

Common Man 34

Common Mind, Group Thinking 40

Conventional, Conventionality 45

Coterie, Bloomsbury 49

D

Democracy 56

Difficulty, Obscurity 63

E

Einstein 70

Empire, Imperialism 77

F

Fascism 85

Form, Formalism 91

G

God, Gods 99

H

Hamlet 107

Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow 111

Hygiene 119

I

Impression, Impressionism 125

International, Internationalism 129

M

Manifesto 136

Modern, Modernism 139

N

Negro, New Negro 147

P

Personality, Impersonality 155

Primitive 162

Propaganda 170

Q

Queer, Gay 177

R

Race 184

Readers, Reading 191

Reality, Realism 196

Rhythm 203

S

Sentimental, Sentimentality 210

Shock, Shell Shock 214

U

Unconscious 223

Universal 231

W

Woman, New Woman 238

Words, Language 246

Index of Modernist Authors 254

Index of Modernist Keywords 263

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