Books by Raymond Williams

Taking inspiration from classic authors from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, Williams shines a light on our society's changing views of the rural and industrial landscapes in which we work and live. Our collective notion of the city and country is irresistibly powerful.

A new and fully-updated centenary edition of Raymond Williams's seminal collection of essays on nationhood and cultural identity, Who Speaks for Wales?

Raymond Williams’s work was always concerned with the relation between culture and society. This book focuses on specific texts and authors, exploring the historical and cultural sources of their particular forms of writing. In it, Williams examines dramatic form and language in Racine and Shakespeare; the politics of fiction in the English Jacobin novel; David Hume and Charles Dickens and the changing characteristics of English prose; Robert Tressell, The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, and the role of region and class in the English novel. Also included are Williams’s reflections on the rise of English studies, on their crisis as the literary traditions of Cambridge University were beset by the ‘structuralist controversy’, and on the wider implications of this redefinition of the critical field.

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature - from George Eliot to George Orwell - Williams provides insights into the social and economic forces that have shaped British culture and society.

The founding father of cultural theory posits a radical new direction for avant-garde art.

Modern Tragedy, first published in 1966, is a study of the ideas and ideologies which have influenced the production and analysis of tragedy. Williams sees tragedy both in terms of literary tradition and in relation to the tragedies of modern society, of revolution and disorder, and of individual experience.

This text was first published in 1974, long before the dawn of multi-channel TV, or the reality and celebrity shows that now pack the schedules. Yet Williams' analysis of television's history, its institutions, programmes and practices, and its future prospects, remains prescient.

Harry Price has worked for years as a railway signalman in the Welsh border village of Glynmawr. Now he has had a stroke, and his son, Matthew, a lecturer at Oxford, returns to the close-knit community that he left.As Harry lies in silent pain in his cramped bedroom, Matthew experiences the jarring familiarity of the childhood world which, alienated, he can no longer re-enter. Struggling with the unspoken tensions and losses that returning home has provoked, he recalls what has made him who he is. Upstairs his deeply thoughtful father recalls his own arrival in the village, the relationships between men during the General Strike, and the social and personal changes that followed, and he struggles to articulate all that has been left unsaid. A beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son, and of the strength and resilience of a small community, Border Country is Raymond Williams finest novel.

Raymond Williams made a central contribution to the intellectual culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. He was also one of the key figures in the foundation of cultural studies in Britain, which turned critical skills honed on textual analysis to the examination of structures and forms of resistance apparent in everyday life. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by New Left Review, designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by writer Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across Williams's biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

Raymond Williams' seminal exploration of the meaning of some of the most important words in the English language.First published in 1976, and expanded in 1983, KEYWORDS reveals how the meanings of 131 words - including 'art', 'class', 'family', 'media', 'sex' and 'tradition' - were formed and subsequently altered and redefined as the historical contexts in which they were used changed.Neither a defining dictionary or glossary, KEYWORDS is rather a brilliant investigation into how the meanings of some of the most important words in the English language have shifted over time, and the forces that brought about those shifts.