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Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone (Politics and Letters, 1979) and there are many translations available.
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Quotations
Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.
Keywords (1983)
The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.
Realism and the Contemporary Novel - The Long Revolution (1961)
Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.
Realism and the Contemporary Novel - The Long Revolution (1961)
Encyclopedia
Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone (Politics and Letters, 1979) and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.
Life
Born in Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny, Wales, Williams was the son of a railway worker in a village where all of the railwaymen voted Labour while the local small farmers mostly voted Liberal. It was not a Welsh-speaking area - he described it as 'Anglicised in the 1840s' (Politics and Letters, 1979). There was, however, a strong Welsh identity. "There is the joke that someone says his family came over with the Normans and we reply: 'Are you liking it here?'".
He attended King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny. His teenage years were overshadowed by the rise of Nazism and the threat of war. He was 14 when the Spanish Civil War broke out, and was very conscious of what was happening through his membership of the local Left Book Club. He also mentions the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, originally published in Britain by the Left Book Club (Politics and Letters).
At this time, he was a supporter of the League of Nations, attending a League-organised youth conference in Geneva. On the way back, his group visited Paris and he went to the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition. There he bought a copy of The Communist Manifesto and read Marx for the first time.
Second World War
He went to Trinity College, Cambridge, but his education was interrupted by war service. He joined the British Communist Party while at Cambridge. Along with Eric Hobsbawm, he was given the task of writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War. He says in (Politics and Letters) that they "were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words." At the time, the British government was keen to support Finland in its war against the Soviet Union, while still being at war with Nazi Germany.
In the winter of 1940, he decided that he should join the British Army. This was against the Party line at the time, though in fact he stayed at Cambridge to take his exams in June 1941, the same month that Germany invaded Russia. As he describes it, his membership lapsed, without him ever formally resigning.
At the time he joined the army, it was normal for undergraduates to be directed into the signal corps. He received some initial training, but was then switched to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He was seen as 'officer material' and served as an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division, 1941-1945, being sent into the early fighting in Normandy after D Day. In Politics and Letters, he says "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded". He commanded a unit of four tanks and mentions losing touch with two of them during fighting against SS Panzer forces; he never discovered what happened to them, because there was then a withdrawal.
He was part of the fighting from Normandy in 1944 through Belgium and Holland to Germany in 1945, where he was involved with the liberation of one of the smaller concentration camps, which was afterwards used to detain SS officers. He was also shocked to find that Hamburg had suffered saturation bombing by the RAF, not just of military targets and docks as they had been told.
Adult education
He received his M.A. from Trinity in 1946 and then served as a tutor in adult education at the University of Oxford for several years. In 1951 he was recalled to the Army as reservist to fight in the Korean War. He refused to go, and registered as a conscientious objector.
He made his reputation with Culture and Society, published in 1958 and an immediate success. This was followed in 1961 by The Long Revolution. Williams's writings were taken up by the New Left and received a very wide readership. He was also well-known as a regular book reviewer for the Manchester Guardian newspaper. His years in adult education were an important experience and Williams was always something of an outsider at Cambridge University. Asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, he began his essay by saying that "It was never my Cambridge. That was clear from the start".
Cambridge University
On the strength of his books, Williams was invited to return to Cambridge in 1961, eventually becoming Professor of Drama there (1974 - 1983). He was Visiting Professor of Political Science at Stanford University in 1973, an experience that he used to good effect in his still useful book Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974). A committed socialist, he was greatly interested in the relationships between language, literature, and society and published many books, essays and articles on these and other issues. Among the most important is The Country and the City (1973), in which chapters about literature alternate with chapters of social history. His tightly written Marxism and Literature (1977) is mainly for specialists, but it also sets out his own approach to cultural studies, which he called cultural materialism. This book was in part a response to "structuralism" in literary studies and pressure on Williams to make a more theoretical statement of his own position against criticisms that it was a humanist Marxism, based on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. He makes considerable use of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, though the book is uniquely Williams and written in his own characteristic voice. For a more accessible version, see his book Culture (1981/1982), which also further develops some key arguments, especially about aesthetics.
Debate
Williams's position about other writers on culture and society may surprise some readers. For example, in his short book about George Orwell, he is sharply critical of a figure with whom many people assume he has much in common. Williams also wrote in a critical way about Marshall McLuhan's writings on technology and society. This is the background to the chapter in Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974) called "The Technology and the Society." His book on Modern Tragedy may be read as a response The Death of Tragedy, by the conservative literary critic George Steiner. Later, Williams was interested in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, though opining that the latter was too pessimistic in terms of the possibilities for social change.
Last years
He retired from Cambridge in 1983 and spent his last years in Saffron Walden. While there, he wrote Loyalties, a novel about a fictional group of upper-class radicals attracted to 1930s Communism. He was also working on People of the Black Mountains, an experimental historical novel about people who lived or might have lived around the Black Mountains, the part of Wales he came from. It is told through a series of flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times, who is looking for his grandfather who has not returned from a hill-walk. He imagines the region as it was and might have been. The story begins in the Old Stone Age and was intended to come right up to modern times, always focusing on ordinary people.
Raymond Williams had completed it to mediaeval times when he died in 1988. It was prepared for publication by his wife Joy Williams. It was published in two volumes, along with a Postscript that gives a brief description of what the remaining work would have been. Almost all of the stories were completed in typescript, generally revised many times by the author. Only The Comet was left incomplete and needed some small additions to make a continuous narrative.
In the 1980s, Williams made important links with debates in feminist, peace and ecology movements and extended his position beyond what might be recognized as Marxism. He concluded that because there were many different societies in the world there would be not one, but many socialisms.
Publications
Novels
- Border Country, London, Chatto and Windus, 1960. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
- Second Generation, London, Chatto and Windus, 1964. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
- The Volunteers, London, Eyre-Methuen, 1978. Paperback edition, London, Hogarth Press, 1985
- The Fight for Manod, London, Chatto and Windus, 1979. reissued Hogarth Press, 1987.
- Loyalties, London, Chatto and Windus, 1985
- People of the Black Mountains, Volume 1: The Beginning, London, Chatto and Windus, 1989
- People of the Black Mountains, Volume 2: The Eggs of the Eagle, London, Chatto and Windus, 1990
Literary and cultural studies
- Reading and Criticism, Man and Society Series, London, Frederick Muller, 1950.
- Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, London, Chatto and Windus, 1952. Revised edition, London, Chatto and Windus, 1968.
- Raymond Williams and Michael Orrom, Preface to Film, London, Film Drama, 1954.
- Culture and Society, London, Chatto and Windus, 1958. New edition with a new introduction, New York, Columbia University Press, 1963. Translated into Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and German.
- The Long Revolution, London, Chatto and Windus, 1961. Reissued with additional footnotes, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965.
- Communications, Britain in the Sixties Series, Harmondsworth, Penguin Special, Baltimore, Penguin, 1962: revised edition, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966. Third edition, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976. Translated into Danish and Spanish.
- Modern Tragedy, London, Chatto and Windus, 1966. New edition, without play Koba and with new Afterword, London, Verso, 1979.
- S. Hall, R. Williams and E. P. Thompson (eds.) New Left May Day Manifesto. London, May Day Manifesto Committee, 1967. R. Williams (ed.) May Day Manifesto, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968, 2nd edition.
- Drama in Performance (book by Raymond Williams), revised edition. New Thinkers Library, C. A. Watts, 1954
- Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London, Chatto and Windus, 1968. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1987.
- The Pelican Book of English Prose, Volume 2: From 1780 to the Present Day, R. Williams, (ed.) Harmondsworth and Baltimore, Penguin, 1969
- The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence, London Chatto and Windus, 1970. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1985
- Orwell, Fontana Modern Masters Series, Glasgow, Collins, 1971. 2nd edition. Glasgow, Collins, Flamingo Paperback Editions, Glasgow, Collins, 1984.
- The Country and the City, London, Chatto and Windus, 1973. Reprinted, London, Hogarth Press, 1985. Translated into Spanish.
- J. Williams and R. Williams (eds) D H Lawrence on Education, Harmondsworth, Penguin Education, 1973.
- R. Williams (ed.) George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth Century Views, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 1974.
- Television: Technology and Cultural form, Technosphere Series, London, Collins, 1974. (ISBN 978-0415314565) Translated into Chinese (Taiwan's complex characters), Italian, Korean and Swedish.
- Keywords, Fontana Communications Series, London, Collins, 1976. New edition, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984.
- M. Axton and R. Williams (eds) English Drama: Forms and Developments, Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, with an introduction by R. Williams, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
- Marxism and Literature, Marxist Introductions Series, London and New York, Oxford University Press, 1977. Translated into Spanish, Italian and Korean.
- Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, London, New Left Books, 1979, Verso paperback edition, 1981.
- Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, London, Verso, 1980. New York, Schocken, 1981. Reissued as Culture and Materialism, Verso Radical Thinkers Series, 2005.
- Culture, Fontana New Sociology Series, Glasgow, Collins, 1981. US edition, The Sociology of Culture, New York, Schocken, 1982.
- R. and E. Williams (eds) Contact: Human Communication and its History, London and New York, Thames and Hudson, 1981.
- Cobbett, Past Masters series, Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1983.
- Towards 2000, London, Chatto and Windus, 1983. US edition, The Sociology of Culture, with a Preface to the American edition, New York, Pantheon, 1984.
- Writing in Society , London, Verso, 1983. US edition. New York, Verso, 1984
- M. Williams and R. Williams (eds) John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, Methuen English Texts, London and New York, Methuen, 1986.
- Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings, Preface by R. Williams, A. O'Connor, (ed.) London, Routledge, 1989.
- Resources of Hope, R. Gable (ed.) London and New York, Verso, 1989.
- What I Came to Say, London, Hutchinson-Radius, 1989.
- The Politics of Modernism, T. Pinkney (ed.) London and New York, Verso, 1989.
- The Raymond Williams Reader, J. Higgins (ed.) Oxford, Blackwell, 2001.
Short stories
- Red Earth, Cambridge Front, no. 2 (1941)
- Sack Labourer, in English Short Story 1, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, Collins, 1941
- Sugar, in R. Williams, M. Orrom, M.J. Craig (eds) Outlook: a Selection of Cambridge Writings, Cambridge, 1941, pp.7-14.
- This Time, in New Writing and Daylight, no. 2, 1942-3, J. Lehmann (ed.) London, Collins, 1943, pp. 158-64.
- A Fine Room to be Ill In, in English Story 8, W. Wyatt (ed.) London, 1948.
Drama
- Koba (1966) in Modern Tragedy, London, Chatto and Windus
- A Letter from the Country, BBC Television, April 1966, Stand, 12(1971), pp17-34
- Public Enquiry, BBC Television, 15 March 1967, Stand, 9 (1967), pp15-53
Introductions
Biographical and critical studies
Book length treatments
- Cevasco, Maria Elisa. Para ler Raymond Williams (Portuguese of To Read Raymond Williams)São Paulo, Paz e Terra, 2001.
- Eagleton, Terry, editor. Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989.
- Ethridge, J.E.T. Raymond Williams: Making Connections. New York: Routledge, 1994.
- Gorak, Jan. The Alien Mind of Raymond Williams. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1988.
- Higgins, John. Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism. London and New York, Routledge, 1999.
- Inglis, Fred. Raymond Williams. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
- Jones, Paul. "Raymond Williams's Sociology of Culture: A Critical Reconstruction". London: Palgrave, 2004.
- Lusted, David, editor. Raymond Williams: Film, TV, Culture, London: British Film Institute, 1989.
- Milligan, Don. , Studies in Anti-Capitalism, 2007.
- Milner, Andrew Re-Imagining Cultural Studies: The Promise of Cultural Materialism, London: Sage, 2002.
- O'Connor, Alan. Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989.
- O'Connor, Alan. Raymond Williams. Critical Media Studies. Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
- Pinkney, Tony, editor. Raymond Williams. Bridgen, Mid Glamorgan, England: Sern Books, 1991.
- Politics and Letters (London, New Left Books, 1979) gives the author's own account of his life and work
- Smith, Dai. Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale. Cardigan: Parthian, 2008.
- Stevenson, Nick. Culture, Ideology, and Socialism: Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. Aldershot, England: Avebury, 1995.
- Tredell, Nicolas. Uncancelled Challenge: the work of Raymond Williams. Nottingham: Paupers' Press, 1990. ISBN 0946650160
- Ward, J. P. Raymond Williams in the Writers of Wales series. University of Wales Press, 1981.
- Williams, Daniel, editor. Who Speaks for Wales?: Nation, Culture, Identity, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003.
- Woodhams, Stephen. History in the Making: Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Radical Intellectuals 1936-1956, Merlin Press 2001.
Treatments of his books
- [Dempsey, Lorcan] A neglected Welsh-English dystopia. . 8 April 2006.
- Dai Smith discusses Raymond Williams' Border Country.
- Dai Smith. to Border Country, Cardigan: Parthian, 2006.
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