A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory (2nd edition)

It is easy to mock the concept of “culture”. “When I hear the word ‘culture’, I reach for my pistol” Hermann Goering is alleged to have said[1]; in an essay of 1952, quoted here, Kraeber and Kluckholm distinguished 75 definitions of “culture”; and wrote Raymond Williams (Keywords, 1976), “culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. The very first sentence of the introduction to this dictionary carries the (quoted) sentence:

Meaning? Critical theory fares little better. For a decade I was the editor of a literary journal, Brontë Studies, not...