Raymond Williams was to become one of Britain's greatest post-war
cultural historians, theorists and polemicists. He was a distinguished
literary and social thinker in the Left-Leavisite tradition. He was
concerned to understand literature and related cultural forms not as
the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure, but as the
manifestation of a deeply social process that involved a series of
complex relationships between authorial ideology, institutional
process, and generic/aesthetic form.
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,
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
His preoccupation with the relationships between ideology and culture,
and the development of socialist perspectives in the
communicative arts, were to continue in such other works as May
Day Manifesto 1968, The English Novel from Dickens to
Lawrence, Problems in Materialism and Culture, Culture,
Writing in Society, Towards 2000, Resources of Hope, The Politics
of Modernism, and Politics, Education, Letters. Politics and
Letters: Interviews with 'New Left Review' provides a useful
retrospective.he also wrote Novels as Border Country,Second
Generation Chatto and Windus 1964,The Volunteers 1978,The
Fight for Manod 1979 Literary and cultural studies,Reading and
Criticism.,Drama from Ibsen to Eliot
1952.,Communications,Modern Tragedy 1966. Drama in
Performance ,Drama from Ibsen to Brecht 1968. The Pelican Book
of English Prose Volume 2: The English Novel From Dickens to
Lawrence, 1970. Orwell Keywords, English Drama: Forms and
Developments, Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook,
1983,Resources of Hope,What I Came to Say 1989,The Politics of
Modernism, 1989.
In the 1960s Williams' work was to take on new dimensions. He
published his first, autobiographical novel, Border
Country, which was to be followed by Second Generation,
The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod. At the beginning
of the decade, he was to write his first book directly
addressing the new world of contemporary mass media,
Communications, an informative and influential volume in
the early history of media studies in Great Britain and
internationally. He was to move to the centre of left cultural
politics, in the crucible of 1968, with his chairmanship of
the Left National Committee and his edition of the May Day
Manifesto 1968.
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.
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.[2]
Godeanu Ileana Cornelia
R.I.S.E. anul I, grupa I
