Keywords for Today A 21st Century Vocabulary

Keywords for Today takes us deep into the history of the language in order to better understand our contemporary world. From nature to cultural appropriation and from market to terror, the most important words in political and cultural debate have complicated and complex histories. This book sketches these histories in ways that illuminate the political bent and values of our current society. Written by The Keywords Project, an independent group of scholars who have spent more than a decade on this work, Keywords for Today updates and extends Raymond Williams's classic work, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. It updates some 40 of Williams's original entries and adds 86 new entries, ranging from access to youth. The book is both a history of English, documenting important semantic change in the language, and a handbook of current political and ideological debate. Whether it is demonstrating the only recently-acquired religious meaning of fundamentalism or the complicated linguistic history of queer, Keywords for Today will intrigue and enlighten.

The Keywords Project is an independent group of scholars who, with the support of the University of Pittsburgh, Jesus College, Cambridge, and the academic journal Critical Quarterly, have spent more than a decade preparing Keywords for Today.

Colin MacCabe taught the history of modern and Early Modern English at Cambridge and Strathclyde universities before becoming Head of Production at the British Film Institute in 1985. Since then he has combined literary criticism and film production. His most recent book is Perpetual Carnival: Essays in Film and Literature (2017) and his most recent film The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger (2016). He edits Critical Quarterly and chairs The Derek Jarman Lab.

Holly Yanacek is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at James Madison University. Her research focuses on 19

Introduction
How to Read Keywords for Today
Keywords
Appendix 1: Sources of Lexical Data
Appendix 2: History of the Keywords Project