Review by Choice Review
A collaborative project involving 14 academic scholars and numerous graduate students, this collection of 123 essays updates Raymond Williams's classic Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1st ed., CH, Jun'76; rev. ed., 1983). As used here, the term keywords denotes not search terminology but rather words important in contemporary sociocultural parlance, words that have complex histories and may have different connotations for different political or social groups. The volume includes about 40 keywords from Williams's original edition (e.g., "equality," "culture")--all updated or reanalyzed for the present volume; the rest of the keywords (among them "appropriation," "occupy") are new. Each entry describes social change as revealed through shifting semantics; many include concrete examples. After laying out etymological meanings from the OED and other sources, the entries offer definitions and usage in wide-ranging contemporary contexts: for example, the meanings of "gender" in its legal, biological, and sociocultural senses. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (CH, Dec'05, 43-1940), a previous update of Williams, has a more subjective tone, but it includes many current words not mentioned in this most recent revision ("resistance," "other"). This is a valuable update of this important, longstanding resource. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Sarah L. Johnson, Eastern Illinois University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
