Late Modern English

— Topics discussed in the papers that follow include many that will be familiar to scholars interested in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English, but the reader will find here increasing scope and refinement – a sign, we hope, of a maturing discipline. In this introduction we will sketch the early developments of work on Late Modern English and then preview the fifteen papers included in this volume, highlighting their main results and setting them against the earlier context. / It is probably accurate to say that work on Late Modern English (LModE) only took off in any serious way during the 1990s. There were of course prior studies of eighteenth and nineteenth-century English, but these were relatively thin on the ground compared with the great amounts of work done on the Old, Middle and Early Modern periods.