In 1976 there appeared a landmark book by the Welsh European socialist intellectual Raymond Williams (1921–1988) titled Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society . With an expanded second edition in 1983, Keywords has remained in print continuously and during these years has proved its value for scholars of the novel. Now in a new volume, Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by Colin MacCabe and Holly Yanacek, a multidisciplinary and international team of fourteen scholars revises and updates Williams's classic. On this occasion, Novel has invited us to sketch for its readers something of the continuing resource an updated keywords approach offers.
Williams began work on Keywords in the 1950s, while writing the book that first won him renown: Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (1958). Culture and Society demonstrates how British writers, living amid the immense social and political changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, repurposed...
