Raymond Williams
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| Raymond Williams was 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 with understanding 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. Pioneering in the context of the British literary academy, these concerns are heralded in the brief-lived post-war journal Politics and Letters, which he co-founded. | Raymond Williams was 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 with understanding 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. Pioneering in the context of the British literary academy, these concerns are heralded in the brief-lived post-war journal Politics and Letters, which he co-founded. | ||
| - | His most important legacy is the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies which he pioneered and consolidated. As part of his contribution, he articulated and refined such key concepts as, structure of feeling, knowable community, hegemony, and cultural materialism. | + | His most important legacy is the interdisciplinary field of [[cultural studies]] which he pioneered and consolidated. As part of his contribution, he articulated and refined such key concepts as, structure of feeling, knowable community, hegemony, and cultural materialism. |
| In the 1950s and early 1960s, in Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications, Wiliams established the frameworks for placing literary debates in larger contexts. Williams argued for the democratization of culture through the reform of cultural institutions. | In the 1950s and early 1960s, in Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications, Wiliams established the frameworks for placing literary debates in larger contexts. Williams argued for the democratization of culture through the reform of cultural institutions. | ||
Current revision
Raymond Williams was 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 with understanding 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. Pioneering in the context of the British literary academy, these concerns are heralded in the brief-lived post-war journal Politics and Letters, which he co-founded.
His most important legacy is the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies which he pioneered and consolidated. As part of his contribution, he articulated and refined such key concepts as, structure of feeling, knowable community, hegemony, and cultural materialism.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, in Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications, Wiliams established the frameworks for placing literary debates in larger contexts. Williams argued for the democratization of culture through the reform of cultural institutions.
In the later 1960s and early 1970s, encouraged by a newly politicized generation, Williams produced revaluations of fictions, drama and television: Modern Tragedy, Drama form Ibsen to Brecht, The Country and the City and Televison. In the 1960s published his first, autobiographical novel, Border Country, which was to be followed by Second Generation, The Volunteers and The Fight for Manod.
From 1968 to 1972 he contributed a weekly column on TV to the BBC magazine The Listener. Now collected as Raymond Williams on Television: Collected Writings, these illustrate Williams' response to a wide range of TV themes and pleasures--from an enthusiasm for television sport to a distrust in the medium's stress on `visibility`, to arguments about the economic and political relationships between production and transmission.
In 1970 he created a personal documentary, Border Country, to the BBC series One Pair of Eyes, which was to be followed, at the end of the decade, by The Country and The City: A Film with Raymond Williams, the last of five programmes in the series Where We Live Now: Five Writers Look at Our Surroundings (1979).
In the 1980s he contributed to a trio of Open University/BBC programmes--Language in Use: `The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd` (1981), Society, Education and the State: Worker, Scholar and Citizen (1982) and The State and Society In 1984 (1984). He also appeared in Identity Ascendant: The Home Counties (1988), an episode in the HTV/Channel 4 series The Divided Kingdom, and in Big Words, Small Worlds (1987), Channel 4's record of the Strathclyde Linguistics of Writing Conference.
