Words, Words, Words

What do you read, my lord? Over the past decade, we have witnessed the arrival of a new generation of handbooks—as opposed to dictionaries (e.g., von Stuckrad 2005), encyclopedias (e.g., Jones 2005; Betz et al., 2006), and even essay collections on the field (e.g., Antes et al., 2004). These handbooks owe something to Critical Terms for Literary Study (Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1990; 2nd ed. 1995), a hard-hitting (though, admittedly, still largely “Western” in its focus) source for essays on such common lit crit topics as author, canon, discourse, text, etc. In turn, it is likely Raymond Williams's Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, first published just over thirty years ago ([1976] 1983; Bennett et al., 2005), that lies in the background of this genre's recent emergence. For those unfamiliar with it, Keywords' succinct entries not only trace the history of usage but also consistently inscribe terms such as aesthetic, elite, history, popular, etc. within a coherent theoretical approach (in his case, Marxist literary/culture theory). Despite the obvious difficulties of accomplishing such coherency in any multi-authored work, Critical Terms for Literary Study is useful precisely because it unfailingly treats “literature” as a datum in need of theorization rather than an expressive gift whose meaning needs only to be interpreted and appreciated.