Modernism

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

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 Harcourt annotated edition of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (2008) and contributions to A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture (2006) and A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005).
Adam Hammond recently completed an SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Victoria and is currently the Michael Ridley Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Literature in the Digital Age: A Critical Introduction (forthcoming 2015).
Alexandra Peat is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Culture, Franklin University Switzerland. She is the author of Travel and Modernist Literature: Sacred and Ethical Journeys (2010).