Habeas Corpus? Cultural Keywords, Statistical Keywords, and the Role of a Corpus in their Identification

Abstract

At the end of World War II, a young officer from the British army was granted immediate demobilization to return to Cambridge in order to complete his degree, which had been interrupted by the war. He had enlisted in the army in 1941 at the age of 20 and had led a unit of four tanks as part of the Guards Armoured Division during the battle for Normandy. After successfully completing his undergraduate degree on his return to Cambridge, he took a job as a tutor with the Workers' Educational Association in the hope that it would also allow him time to write novels and literary criticism. Within 10 years, at the age of 35, he had finished his first major work of criticism. This was to become one of the most influential works of criticism in English of the latter half of the twentieth century, and along with other of his books was to play a decisive role in founding and shaping the academic field of Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom. The man was Raymond Williams, and the book was Culture and Society 1780-1950.The manuscript as delivered in 1956 to the publisher Chatto and Windus by a then relatively unknown academica tutor in adult educationwas considered too long, and an important appendix in which Williams discussed words which he considered significant in framing debates about culture and society was left out. Even so, his introduction to Culture and Society carries the subtitle: The Key Words -'Industry', 'Democracy', 'Class', 'Art', 'Culture'. Indeed, his encounter with the history of these words in the Oxford English Dictionary in the basement of the public library of Seaford more or less primed the book and became a cornerstone of his method of literary and cultural analysis.