A groundbreaking work of social, literary and intellectual history by the godfather of the 'New Left'
Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of
Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny
Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in
the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor
in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947
he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was
general editor of the New Thinker's Library. He was elected Fellow
of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed
Professor of Drama.
His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution
(1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962)
and Television- Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in
Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to
Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970),
Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and
Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture
(selected essays) (1980); and four novels - the Welsh trilogy of
Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for
Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978).
Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and
divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales.
He died in 1988.
While written with the energy of political engagement, it is a
critically generous book... Even where you would read something
differently, there is space to disagree
*Guardian*
His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by
two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made
him a major influence on three decades of political thought
*Independent*
I went back to my own edition of The Country and the City...
Certain books are held dear because they are also psychic landmarks
revealing where and how they helped us come into consciousness.
Inevitably, our perception of the world continues to be informed by
such texts long after the precise details of their contents have
been forgotten.
*New Statesman*
He was the foremost political thinker of his generation in Britain
who in his most formidable books, Culture And Society, The Long
Revolution and The Country and the City, redrew the map of our
cultural history, and elsewhere made heroic interventions in the
main political debates of his time
*Guardian*
The first thing that struck me about this book when I read it as an
undergraduate was the personable charm of the narrator. Embarking
on a topic which could hardly be broader or grander: the study of
how literature has described the world; he starts with his own
country, with his own city. His emotion about his birthplace his
sense of belonging, is so powerful, that the book reads at times
like an autobiography, like a love-letter to the country of his
childhood
*Independent*
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