Book review
Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism: C. K. Ogden and his Contemporaries. By James McElvenny.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. vii, 188 pp. ISBN 9781474425032 £ 75.00

Reviewed by W. Terrence Gordon
Dalhousie University, Canada
Table of contents

James McElvenny (henceforth: M) opens by directing his attention to Charles Kay Ogden’s (1889–1957) literary interpreters, H.G. Wells and George Orwell (who will loom large in chapter 3), citing the latter commenting on the former: “History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man” (p. 1). The quotation overarches the perspective which M immediately begins developing, and it quietly alerts the reader to the broad tableau that M will paint, though never with a broad brush. This book works because M recognized that the three distinct phases of Ogden’s program of research effectively create something of a ‘panopticon’ providing links to science, philosophy, and linguistics in both its theoretical and applied forms (international language).

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References

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