Raymond Williams was a Welsh author, academic and cultural theorist. He developed the concept of cultural materialism, which views culture as part of an active historical process shaped by social and economic forces. Some key aspects of his work include identifying the "structure of feeling" of an era, viewing culture as "ordinary" and democratic, and analyzing culture through the lenses of dominant, residual and emergent forces. His 1973 book The Country and The City analyzed how English literature depicted rural and urban life and their changing relationship over time. Williams made important contributions to Marxist literary and cultural theory.

1. Raymond Williams
(1921-1988): An
Overview
AMNA FAROOQ
PHD SCHOLAR
GCUF

2. Content
 Biography
 Influences on Raymond
 Literature: Within Marxist Culture Theory
 Country and City
 Cultural Marxism
 Cultural Materialism
 Modern Tragedy
 Tenses of Imagination
 Criticism on Raymond
 Conclusion
 References

3. Biography
 Raymond Williams (1921-1988) was an author, academic,
cultural theorist, literary critic, public intellectual, socialist, and
a leading figure of the New Left. He was the son of working-
class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult education
tutor, a Cambridge professor, and, according to Terry Eagleton,
was and wasn’t a Marxist.
 From such unique positions, he established a new mode of
critical analysis, cultural materialism, grounded in a concept of
culture which identifies cultural practice as part of an active,
dynamic, historical process.

4.  His work consistently draws attention to two strands within cultural forms: the
contingent and the subjunctive. The former figures history as driven by human
action while the latter looks for moments which ask what alternatives are
possible and how.
 From here, Williams developed a number of enduring theoretical concepts:
 he identified a ‘structure of feeling’, what he described as ‘the area of interaction
between the official consciousness of an epoch […] and the whole process of actually
living its consequences’;
 he insisted upon viewing culture as ‘ordinary’, as everyday and (potentially at least)
democratic, being constantly made and re-made;
 and he formulated three forces or tensions within the development of cultural form:
the residual (pre-existing and traditional), the dominant (central and defining), and
the emergent (new and challenging).
 All of these give a glimpse into his relevance and influence as well as providing
a way of analyzing and critiquing cultural transformation, placing a primary
focus on culture as, what Williams notably called, ‘a whole way of life’,
something made and lived.

5. BOOKS BY RAYMOND WILLIAMS:
 Reading and Criticism (Frederick Muller, 1950)
 Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (Chatto & Windus, 1952)
 Drama in Performance (Watts, 1954)
 Preface to Film (with Michael Orram). Williams’s section of the book is titled: ‘Film and the
Dramatic Tradition’. (Film Drama, 1954)
 Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (Chatto & Windus, 1958)
 The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus, 1961)
 Communications (Penguin, 1962)
 Modern Tragedy (Chatto & Windus, 1966)
 May Day Manifesto 1968, edited by Williams (Penguin, 1968)
 Drama From Ibsen to Brecht (Chatto & Windus, 1968)
 The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (Chatto & Windus, 1970)
 Orwell (Fontana, 1971)
 The Country and The City (Chatto & Windus, 1973)
 Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Fontana, 1974)

6.  Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Fontana, 1975)
 Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977)
 Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (NLB, 1979)
 Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (Verso, 1980)
 Culture (Fontana, 1981)
 Towards 2000 (Chatto & Windus, 1983)
 Writing in Society (Verso, 1983)
 Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (Verso, 1989)
 Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (Verso, 1989)
 Raymond Williams on Television: Selected Writings, ed. Alan O’Connor (Routledge, 1989)
 What I Came to Say, ed. Neil Belton, Francis Mulhern, & Jenny Taylor (Hutchinson Radius, 1989)
 The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Blackwell, 2001)
 Who Speak for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity, ed. Daniel Williams (University of Wales Press, 2003)

7. NOVELS BY RAYMOND WILLIAMS:
 Border Country (Chatto & Windus, 1960)
 Second Generation (Chatto & Windus, 1964)
 The Volunteers (Eyre Methuen, 1978)
 The Fight for Manod (Chatto & Windus, 1979)
 Loyalties (Chatto & Windus, 1985)
 People of the Black Mountains, Part I (Chatto & Windus, 1989)
 People of the Black Mountains, Part II (Chatto & Windus, 1990)

8. Influences on Raymond
 Raymond Williams was basically a Marxist critic, he was also a novelist as well as a media theorist, a critical
literary theorist.
 He was initially from the working class background but he was educated in Cambridge and could never come
to terms with this feeling, he never felt at one with the Cambridge environment,
 he was also a member of the Communist Party. But when he joined the British Army during the Second World
War, we find that the Communistu Party being opposed to this idea of its members joining war efforts opposed
it. And very soon, we find that Raymond Williams did not renew his membership and he left.
 Despite this fact we find that the impact of Marxist is very dominant in his writings, he is considered to be a
very important figure of the new left, he has influenced the ideas of the new left as well as he was also
influenced by them.
 He also made important contributions to the Marxist critique of culture and arts. And along with Richard
Hoggart and E.P. Thompson, he was instrumental in founding the field of cultural studies; he formulated also
cultural materialism as an approach which later on became a very popular way of looking at literary texts.
 In his ideologies, we find that he is followed Herbert Marcuse as well as Antonio Gramsci and certain other
Marxist critics. His analysis of literature and culture is based on his understanding of the class according to the
Marxist purview.
 In his early days, he was inspired by T.S. Eliot work on culture. When he read his “Notes Towards the Definition
of Culture”, he decided to investigate this idea of culture further and this impact of T.S. Eliot and certain other
modernist, critics and theories can be seen easily in his early work.

9.  One of his major work is on the impact of media. His book which was published in 1974,
Television Technology and Cultural Form evaluates the work of Marshall McLuhan and even
though he agrees with most of the suggestions given by Marshall McLuhan, we find that he
does not agree to the technical determinism which is sometimes a part of McLuhan’s
prophetic work. He suggests that in the development of human processes, it is always the
social which will have precedence over a technological. Whereas in McLuhan, we find that the
idea is different.
 Another major text which was published in 1976 and later on revised in 1983 Key Words is
based on the explanation of certain words, certain terms and Raymond Williams attempts to
contextualize them fully. In his earlier edition, he had taken up 60 words but then in the later
edition, he added 21 new words incorporating words like ecology and anarchism. He wants to
give a cultural interpretation of these terms also.
 A similar bent of mind can be seen in some other publications also for example, Marxism and
Literature, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review as well as any selected essays
which came out with the title of Problems In Materialism And Culture in 1980. In all his works
we find that there is a continuous endeavour to look at the phenomena of culture from
different perspectives and understand and explain it fully.

10.  Raymond Williams calls himself an evolved Marxist, he looked beyond the economic forces
only particularly in the realm of culture. He has re-evaluated the orthodox position of Marxist
and took up what is sometimes known as conjectural analysis to move beyond the
reductionist applications of Marxism which based on defining economic situation or the class
consciousness only as a sole governing factor behind different social formations. Instead of
that Williams looks at a combination of events to find out the cultural responses of the
people.
 He has also made some interesting and fascinating postulates in literary criticism, in fact it is
the analysis of Wuthering Heights by Raymond Williams which has introduced the idea of
class consciousness in a major way in literary criticism. His critic of Wuthering Heights talks
about how the origins of the class system took place in the British society.
 What was the impact of industrialisation on British society and culture particularly, in the far-
off areas, he also looks at Heathcliff's character as a reminder of dramatic social change.
Towards his later work we find that he has shifted from new criticism to moral criticism of the
kind which was popularised by FR. Leavis and as we have seen earlier, he is a major influence
on the British left.
 looking at the British critical context at the time when Williams had started writing, we find
that the situation was a bit fuzzy.

11. Concept of Literature by Williams,
Marxism and literature (1977).
 Examine the place of literature within Marxist Culture
Theory
 Difficult to view Literature as a concept
 Concept of literature as an “immediate living
experience, in an extraordinary ideological feat”
 Traces the development of the concept of literature in
its modern form since renaissance.

12.  Three complicating tendencies
i. A shift from ‘learning to taste or sensibility’ as a criterion defining literary
quality
ii. An increase specialization of literature to ‘creative and imaginative works’
iii. Development of the concept of tradition within national terms, resulting in
more effective definition of ‘national literature’.
 “See the active value of literature as not tied to the concept but as an
element of continuity and changing practice beyond its old forms”
 An effective Marxists literary theory must challenge all bourgeoisie
concepts

13. Country and City
The Country and The City (1973)
 In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams analyzes images of the country and the city
in English literature since the 16th century, and how these images become central symbols for
conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development in
England.
 Williams debunks the notion of rural life as simple, natural, and unadulterated, leaving an
image of the country as a Golden age. This is, according to Williams, “a myth functioning as a
memory” that dissimulates class conflict, enmity, and animosity present in the country since
the 16th century.
 Williams shows how this imagery is embedded in the writings of English poets, novelists and
essayists. These writers have not just reproduced the rural-urban divide, but their works have
also served to justify the existing social order.
 The city, on the other hand, is depicted in English novels as a symbol of capitalist production,
labor, domicile, and exploitation, where it is seen as the “dark mirror” of the country. The
country represented Eden while the city became the hub of modernity, a quintessential place
of loneliness and loss of romanticism. In the novels of Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy,
there seems to be a feeling of loss, and at the same time a sense of harmony among the
lonely and isolated souls.

14.  For Williams, “the contrast of the country and city is one of the major forms in which we
become conscious of a central part of our experience and of the crises of our society”
(p. 289).
 What kinds of experience do the ideas appear to interpret, and why do certain forms occur
or recur at this period or at that? To answer these questions, Williams argues that “we need
to trace, historically and critically, the various forms of the ideas” (p. 290).
 It is this historical perspective that makes Williams's work essentially important for it rejects
a simple, dualistic explanation of the city as evil in search of peace and harmony in the
countryside. Instead, Williams sees the country as inextricably related to the city. In search of
the historical, lived form, Williams distinguishes two of his best-known categories:
“knowable communities” and the “structure of feeling.” Over the centuries, Williams
describes the prevailing structure of feeling—traces of the lived experience of a community
distinct from the institutional and ideological organization of the society—in the works of
poets and novelists.
 In the same vein, Williams sees most novels as “knowable communities” in the sense that
the “novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and
communicable ways” (p. 163). In sum, Williams notably said: “It was always a limited inquiry:
the country and the city within a single tradition. But it has brought me to the point where I
can offer its meanings, its implications and its connections to others: for discussion and
amendment; for many kinds of possible cooperative work; but above all for an emphasis—
the sense of an experience and of ways of changing it—in the many countries and cities
where we live” (p. 306).

15. Cultural Marxism
Culture and Society (1963)
 "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Analysis" is a chapter written
by Raymond Williams in his book Culture and Society. In this chapter,
Williams revisits various theories of cultural analysis, like base and
superstructure, Totality, hegemony, and then gives his own theory of
Dominant, Residual, and Emergent.
 Base and Superstructure
 Hegemony
 Totality

16. Base and Superstructure
 Base and Superstructure Karl Marx
 Hegemony Antonio Gramsci
 Totality Gyorgy Lukacs
 Williams Revisits all these theories and gives
his own theory of ‘studying and analyzing
culture’.
 He rejects all these method of studying and
analyzing culture.

17.  Base and Superstructure is the soul of Marxist Philosophy. However, Raymond Williams makes this model
look redundant, and believes that for the survival of Base And Superstructure in Marxist Theory depends
on certain qualifications. What are the qualifications which Raymond Williams made in Base in
Superstructure?
 What is the relationship between Base and Superstructure?
 Meaning of determinism.
 Nature of Base
 Static acc to Marxists dynamic acc to Williams
 Raymond's view on Relationship of Base and Superstructure
 Not Direct
 Instead of notion of reflection mediation is better
 Productive forces, are not contributed by superstructure
 Example of Dead end.
 Piano maker distributor and piano player
 Qualifications in the determination
 Qualifications in Superstructure.
 Qualifications in Base
 the concept of Totality by Gerogery Luckas and the concept of Hegemony by Antonio Gramsci. Raymond
Williams revisits these concept and also finds problems with them. What are the views of Raymond
Williams about Totality and Hegemony?
 Totality ignores intensions thus lacks inclusiveness

18. Williams Model of cultural Analysis: Dominant, Residual, and Emergent
 Williams revisits various theories of cultural analysis, like base and superstructure,
Totality, hegemony, and then gives his own theory of Dominant, Residual, and
Emergent.
 Dominant,
 Followed by general public
 Louis Althusser’s ISA; educational institutes
 Residual
 Practices of past culture, allowed by dominate cult
 Emergent
 Wanted to impose their culture;
 if dominant is sharp, include in itself
 if not emergent oppose Dominant.

19. Cultural Materialism
 In his analysis, he differed from the traditional base/ superstructure equation, and thus formulated “cultural
materialism” expounding that “whatever purpose cultural practices may serve, its means of production. are
always material.”
 Cultural Materialism is an analytical approach that seeks to situate and interpret a cultural practice within:
 institutional structures, (film industry, publishing industry etc.),
 intellectual contexts (schools of thought, movements such as modernism, post colonialism etc.),
 forms and their requirements and limits (such as the history of the western novel as a form, the oral epic
tradition in India, the magical realist novel from Latin America and so on), modes of production (printing,
digital printing, mass media),
 organization and regulatory mechanisms (legislation on copyright laws, patents)
 reproduction (sales, exhibitions, censorship, dissemination through adaptation, reviews etc.).
 Dismissing the traditional Marxist notion of base as too rigid, he argues that the economic base is a
process and not a static condition or object. The base should include not just the industry that produces
but the human labor that reproduces, i.e., the entire realm of social practices. Hence his idea of cultural
materialism encompasses an analysis of the relationship between the economic, political, social and
cultural aspects of society.

20.  Williams borrowed from Althusser an important concept, “overdetermination” the factors
that determine a cultural practice.
 He defined “determination” as being “may be experienced individually but which are
always social acts, indeed specific social formations”
 He also suggests that social factors are internalized by individuals, and that there are
multiple social forces that determine the nature and content of a cultural practice (what
is termed as “over determination”)

21. Modern Tragedy:
Tragedy and Tradition
 ‘Tragedy and Tradition’ is basically about tragedy and its historical perspective. He deems both
tragedy and tradition inter-connected. He does not want to reject the present by the past or vice
versa; but he thinks that concept of tradition is important to understand modern tragedy
 In this essay, Raymond Williams discusses common as well as traditional meanings of tragedy. For
him, tragedy is directly related to culture, society and also to the experiences in life. As he opines that
we come to tragedy by many roads. “It is an immediate experience, a body of literature, conflict of
theory, an academic problem” He feels that tragedy is not simply about death and sufferings, nor
even any response to it; rather it is particular kind of event and a kind of response to the event that is
purely tragic. However, there are certain events and responses in life that generally seem tragic, while
others are not.
 To examine the tragic tradition means not necessarily to expound a single body of work and thinking,
or to trace variations within an assumed totality. The present forces do not meet the conventional
principles of tragedy and they have always been subject to change. It implies that the tradition of
tragedy has been different in every age. As William observes: “tragedy comes to us as a word from
long tradition of European tradition and it is easy to see this tradition as a continuity in one important
way.” Tradition is a product of history, preserved through ages and is subject to the respective age’s
socio-cultural consciousness. So tradition is the word used for continuity of something through a long
past.
 he describes historical development of the idea of Tragedy as follows:

22. Classical Era
 In Greek tragedy, the forces weaving the fabric of tragedy are Fate, Necessity, Chance
and gods. Greek felt that “Fate” and “Necessity” had become natural part of Greek
tragedy as well as life in general. That’s why, the suffering of the main character
symbolizes the sufferings of everyone.
 To Williams, tragedy is neither simply death and suffering nor a response to it. It is a
particular kind of event and response as well, which are purely tragic and embodied by
long tradition. His basic intellection is: “the meaning of tragedy, the relationship of
tradition to tragedy and the kinds of experience which we mistakenly call tragic”
 Deliberating the historical development of tragedy, Williams says that when the unique
Greek culture changed, the chorus which was the critical component of dramatic form
was discarded and the unique meaning of tragedy was lost. He says that things change
and concepts change. On the basis of our concepts we tend to seek permanent
meanings in art which is a serious mistake. He says: “It is not that we lack the evidence.
But we fail to use it because it doesn’t fit our idea of tragedy”.

23. Medieval Era
 In Medieval era, tragedy underwent a vivid change. The governing forces
in the Medieval tragedy are no more the supernatural forces of classical
tragedy. They are replaced by the circumstantial forces. The protagonist is
not in the grip of the supernatural forces but he is to be entangled in the
social upheavals. Feudalism and the church are the two main forces in the
Medieval culture. In Greeks tragedy, the tragic change is from ‘happiness
to misery’ but in Medieval tragedy, it is from ‘prosperity to adversity’. It
means Medieval tragedy emphasizes on the change of worldly or material
change. The tragic hero remains unchanged both in classical and Medieval
tragedies. The protagonist is to be, in all cases, a representative figure of
the age. The tragedy was considered to be a story, an account but not an
action.

24. Renaissance:
 In the Renaissance era, the feudal world of the Medieval is replaced by a new world of
science, learning and materialism and individualism. The Renaissance period was also
dominated by the idea of rank.
 The tragic hero eminent in Renaissance tragedy is fallen to supernatural riddles and
subjected to his own faults and desires as well. Tragedy was considered to be a story of
a noble man who falls in adversity from prosperity. But later, Renaissance tragedy ceases
to be metaphysical in nature and becomes critical in development. The character of
Elizabethan tragedy is determined by a very complicated relationship between elements
of an inherited order and elements of a new humanism.
 Williams holds that Shakespeare was not the real inheritor of the Greeks; rather he was
a major instance of a new kind of tragedy. Secular drama was a major step in the
historical development in the idea of tragedy. In fact, Elizabethan tragedy anticipates the
trends of Humanism and Romanticism. Raymond William says: “In one sense, all drama
after Renaissance is secular”.

25. Neo-Classical:
 During Renaissance, there is a precise emphasis on the fall of famous men, as ‘Rank’ was
still important because the fate of ruling class was the fate of the city. But with the
dissolution of feudal world, the practice of tragedy assumed new directions and
modifications.
 During the Neoclassical period, emphasis on dignity and nobility of the hero continued.
But the moving force of the tragedy was now a matter of behavior rather than a
metaphysical condition. The term “dignity” was given special importance. A dignified
man was considered to be a man of style, hence, language used was also beautified with
different features of embellishments. However, almost at the end of this era, changes
took place in the concept of dignity. Thus “behavior” became more important as it was
thought that an ordinary man could also behave in a dignified manner. The real spirit of
tragedy was moral than metaphysical. The tragic error (hamartia) was moral, a weakness
in an otherwise good man who could still be pitied. The elements of pity and fear were
replaced with admiration and commiseration. The spectator’s response to sufferings
became an activity in itself rather than a mere response to a particular action.

26. Lessing and Tradition:
 According to Raymond Williams, Lessing a German critic and dramatist
also contributed in the idea of tragedy by writing “theoretical rejection
Neo-classicism”, a defense of Shakespeare” and an advocacy and writing of
bourgeois tragedy. He considered neo-classicism as false classicism,
because they were wrongly trying to be as exact and precise as the
classical writers were. They were quite different from them in contents of
tragedy and the only closeness with them was of style. He is of the view
that Shakespeare was the only real inheritor of Greek tragedy.

27. Secular Tragedy:
 It is believed that all the dramas after “Renaissance” were secular, whereas
the Greek drama was religious. Elizabethan drama was secular in practice
but retained a Christian consciousness. Neo-Classical Age is an age of
peace, prosperity and secularism. Neo-classical is the first stage of
substantial secularization. It insisted on relating suffering to moral error.
With the gradual secularization of tragedy, morality became less important
and more attention was paid to the critical side of the tragedy. The
increasing emphasis on rational morality effected the tragic action.
Tragedy, in this view, shows suffering as a consequence of moral error and
happiness as a consequence of virtue; meeting the demands of poetic
justice. The weakness lies in morality as it is static and moral emphasis is
merely dogmatic.

28. Hegel and Hegelion:
 Further he discusses Hegel who didn’t reject the moral scheme of poetic justice but he said
that emphasis on morality would make a work social drama not tragedy.
 Tragedy, he said, was a specific kind of spiritual action. What is important for Hegel is not
the suffering ‘mere suffering’ but its causes. Mere pity and fear are not tragic. It does not
consider the external contingency beyond the control of the individual i.e. illness, loss of
property, death etc.
 To Hegel, conscious individuality, individual freedom and self-determination are essential
for genuine tragic action. Hegel asserts that tragedy recognizes suffering as: ‘suspended
over active characters entirely as the consequence of their own act’. The modern tragedy is
wholly personal and our interest is directed not to the abstract ethical questions but to the
individual and his conditions.
 Hence, Hegel feels that Greek tragedy has been seen as the embodiment of the conflict
between primitive social forms and new social order, whereas with Karl Marx, Renaissance
tragedy has been seen as the result of the conflict between dying feudalism and the new
individualism. Individual suffers, not because he is in conflict with gods or fate, but with
the process of the social transformation. Tragic hero, in Marxist Criticism becomes ‘world
historical individual’, in conflict with ‘world-spirit’.

29. Schopenhaur and Nietzsche:
 The views of these two German philosophers also contributed in the
development of tragedy.
 Before, Schopenhauer, tragedy was associated with ethical crises, human growth
and history. He secularized the whole idea of tragedy. He is of the view that ‘true
sense of tragedy is the deeper insight into man’s original sin i.e. the crime of
existence itself’.
 According to Nietzsche, tragedy dramatizes a tension, which it resolves in a
higher unity. There the hero, who is the highest manifestation of will, is
destroyed, but the eternal life of the hero will remain unaffected. According to
him, the action of tragedy is not moral, nor purgative but aesthetic.
 In the end, it can be said that Raymond Williams’ concept of tragedy and
tradition is not only profound but highly philosophical and thought provoking
also. He has given forceful and historical perspective of tragedy and tradition.
He has coded the views of English as well as German philosophers to make his
arguments forceful.

30. Modern Tragedy

31. Tenses of Imagination
 Tenses of Imagination, an anthology of Raymond Williams’s writings
on science fiction, utopia and dystopia is the seventh volume in the
growing Ralahine Utopian Studies Series
 The volume’s editor, Andrew Milner, has divided Williams’s writings
into four parts:
 the first three are composed of a number of critical essays and interviews,
 while the fourth includes extracts from two of his rather infrequently read,
future-oriented novels, The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod
(1979).
 Part I, subtitled “left Culturalism” includes five texts published between
1956 and 1971;
 part II, focusing on “Cultural Materialism” includes another four, spanning
the period 1971-1977;
 and part III, subtitled “(Anti-)Postmodernism”, presents another five texts
published between 1978 and 1984.

32.  In his concise and informative introduction, Milner explains his principles of
periodization, and hence the logic of the volume’s arrangement. “Left culturalism”
is associated with the moment of “1956”, itself linked to the formation of the “Old
New Left” as a form of compromise between “the left wing of the Labour Party
and the liberalizing wing of the Communist Party” that emerged out of the twin
disappointments of the “suppression of the Hungarian Revolution and the Anglo-
French invasion of Egypt” (1-2).
 “Cultural Materialism” is associated with the moment of “1968”, the critique (by
the likes of Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and others) of the provincialist
nationalism of the Old New Left, the flirtation with a number of “ultraleftisms”,
and the corresponding emphasis on culture as a social and material productive
process, to use Williams’s own words (1-3).
 The final period, that of “(anti)-postmodernism” relates to the dominant import of
globalization and is supposed to manifest the shift of Williams’s focus to the “new
social movements” and to the question of difference (2). Milner admits that the
term “(anti)-postmodernism” is a little inelegant; given the fact that one is not
certain whether the prefix is meant to designate a defining opposition to
globalization (which is not always a central concern in the texts included in the
corresponding section) or, rather, a distaste for the aesthetic of the postmodern
(which could only be derived from Williams’s sparse and highly selective interest
in post WW II literature, both in this volume and elsewhere).

33. Criticism on Raymond
 Terry Eagleton has criticized Williams writing style suggesting that it does not have enough
abrasiveness and enough sharpness which is required in the field of cultural studies.
 To quote from Terry Eagleton, he suggest that “when Raymond Williams had started writing
in the early 1950’s, the ethos of the criticism of 1930’s was compounded by vulgar Marxism,
bourgeois empiricism and romantic idealism and these combinations offered him practically
nothing.” He further says “Marxism had inevitably influenced Williams indeed Marxism and
Socialism supplied between them the formative influence on his early development”.
 In a way Terry Eagleton has summed up the influence of Marxist theoretical approach on
Raymond Williams as well as the way he has dissociated himself from the previous norms of
critical field.
 Williams is particularly known for his contribution which later on became popular as cultural
materialism. This idea was developed by Williams in a series of books particularly Culture
and Society which was published in 1958, soon after that in his 1961 publication, The Long
Revolution and later on refined further in his 1977 publication with the title of Marxism and
Literature. This was further popularized by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield in their
book Political Sakespeare.

34.  Cultural materialism ultimately developed as a theoretical movement in literary
and critical and cultural theories during the 1980’s. It has been defined by Graham
Holderness as a “politicized form of historiography”. This term refers to a particular
approach of literature in terms of criticism and cultural studies which combines
the methods of leftist culturalism and traditional Marxism. It is very much different
from the way New Historicists used to look at a literary text.
 The readings of New Historicists were basically apolitical on the other hand,
cultural materialism is a very politically conscious method we can say that this is a
Marxist orientation of new historicism. Critics in the field of historical materialism
looks at various documents, historical contexts and political perspectives in their
close readings of literary texts. And they want to criticize traditional approaches of
interpretation which have till this point been taken up in the context of canonical
literature.
 There is also an emphasis on unearthing the non-mainstream and the marginal
aspects of historical context and thereby reviewing the possibilities of how these
marginal non-mainstream aspects can subvert the dominant and hegemonic
positions.
 This approach also often embodies a political obligation as a result of the
influences of Marxism as well as later on of feminist studies. It is aware of the
ideological underpinnings of texts and also how power relations operate within
the field of literary criticism.

35. Conclusion
 In works such as Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) he embarked on
what would be a prolonged analysis of cultural development viewed through, and ingrained
within, the transformations of industrial capitalism and capitalist society.
 He was influenced by Antonio Gramsci and the concept of hegemony, writing in opposition to
the methods of vulgar or mechanical Marxism which fail to place due emphasis on the dynamic
nature of cultural production.
 As Stuart Hall has noted, Williams played an integral role in the development of (a politically
engaged) cultural studies. And he theorized the distinctive and decisive experiences of class,
region, and community during an extended engagement with questions of form; these were all
themes which he drew upon and expertly marshalled in his impressive debut novel, Border
Country (1960).
 In Towards 2000 (1983), published five years before his death, Williams offered a prescient
analysis of ‘nomad capitalism’ and labelled as ‘Plan X’ the political and economic project of social
management now commonly understood as neoliberalism; for Williams, this was a new form of
capitalism which aimed to ‘grasp’ and ‘control’ the future. He envisioned a powerful alternative: a
radically new kind of politics coalescing around the disarmament, environment, and feminist
movements.
 Cultural practice would, of course, play a defining role and Williams’s methodological approach
offers a radical kind of critical analysis, one foregrounding the material processes and relations of
culture itself.

36. References
 About Raymond Williams. (2021, May 4). Retrieved from https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/about-raymond-williams/
 Higgins, J. (2001). The Raymond Williams reader. Wiley-Blackwell.
 Higgins, J. (2013). Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and cultural materialism. Routledge.
 Key theories of Raymond Williams. (2018, December 15). Retrieved from https://literariness.org/2017/06/14/key-theories-of-
raymond-williams/
 On what grounds is tradition linked to tragedy? Discuss in the light of Raymond William’s “Modern tragedy”? (n.d.). Retrieved
from https://www.askliterature.com/literary-criticism/on-what-grounds-is-tradition-linked-to-tragedy-discuss-in-the-light-of-
raymond-williams-modern-tragedy/
 Raymond Williams as a Marxist literary theorist. (2017, June 14). Retrieved from https://literariness.org/2016/04/13/raymond-
williams-as-a-marxist-literary-theorist/
 Williams, R. (1975). The country and the city. Oxford University Press, USA.
 Williams, R. (1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford Paperbacks.
 Williams, R. (2010). Tenses of imagination: Raymond Williams on science fiction, utopia and dystopia. Peter Lang.
 Williams, R. (2013). Modern tragedy. Random House.
 Williams, R. (2014). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford University Press.
 Williams, R. (2020). Culture and materialism. Verso Books.
 Williams, R. (n.d.). Base and superstructure in Marxist cultural theory.