Focusing on the curiously contemporary concept of 'political correctness', this open access book is the first study to systematically trace its development, and to link it to concurrent developments in literary theory.

Perhaps no other concept has so drastically altered the nature of contemporary public debate as that of political correctness. The concept rose to public awareness in the early 1990s in relation to debates about higher education in the US, and has become the hub of debates about ethnicity, feminism, free speech, and democracy ever since.

Drawing on materials made available digitally through large databases, as well as texts ranging from feminist classics to terrorist manifestos, this book tells the story of how 'political correctness' goes from being a strategic method within the feminist movement, to becoming a conspiratorial concept that casts feminists and other champions of oppressed groups as 'thought police' threatening free speech, or woke terrorists whose freedom of speech must be curtailed to ensure social stability.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond