Megawords: 200 terms you really need to know

Do you know your animus from your anomie? Puzzled by all that jargon at university? Now there’s no need to be.

‘Richard Osborne has done something very special here. He takes us on an exciting journey into the knowledge required to exist, survive, thrive, in the new millennium, in an interconnected global space that includes cyberpunk and cyborg, chaos theory and conspiracy theories, the postcolonial and the diaspora, hybridity and whiteness, the postmodern and the post-feminist, the digital and the Net, as much as older yet still influential terms like Enlightenment, empiricism, positivism, aesthetics, agency, nationhood, citizenship.

Osborne writes with wit, wisdom, and insight, always wary of any approach becoming an orthodoxy. He shows how particular concepts arise at particular times with particular authors and intellectual personalities. The entries proceed by illuminating examples, engaging anecdotes, subtle cross-referencing, wide historical contexts.’

John Docker, author of Postmodernism and Popular Culture: A Cultural History

Written by the author of the international bestseller Philosophy for Beginners, Megawords provides definitions for the key terms every student in the humanities and social sciences needs to know.