Project Essay Archive

In addition to writing short entries on approximately 100 selected keywords researched by members of the group, the Keywords Project aims to publish online a series of longer and more detailed studies of particular words, as well as wider discussions of method and intellectual context in keyword analysis.

Some of the papers posted here represent work in progress. Others are pre-publication author copies of work published in final form in the publications cited. We acknowledge particular support from the journal Critical Quarterly (published by Blackwell) in the development of such longer ‘keyword’ studies and theoretical discussion.

Relevant published work

by Sylvia Adamson

• 'Working out the Interest: Williams, Empson and Jane Austen'

by Kathryn Allan

• 'Excellence: a new keyword for education?'

by Alan Durant

• 'The significance is in the selection: Identifying Contemporary Keywords'
• 'Raymond Williams' Keywords: investigating meanings 'offered, felt for, tested, confirmed, asserted, qualified, changed'

by Alan Durant and Colin MacCabe

• 'Compacted Doctrines: William Empson and the Meanings of Words'

by Philip Durkin

• 'Keywords revisited: personality and personal in the light of the third edition of the OED'

by Stephen Heath

• 'Representation'

by Colin MacCabe

• ‘In words we are made flesh: towards a new Cambridge philology’
  

By Seth Mehl

• Thinking linguistically about keywords: Polysemy, semantic change and divergent identities

by Terry Smith

• 'Understanding Contemporary/Contemporaneity'

by Katie Wales

• 'Keywords revisited: media'