Raymond Williams was Britain's greatest post-war cultural critic, who espoused a theory of culture, in particular literature and, later, television, as the product of a profoundly social process. Together with other radical academics of the "New Left" such as Eric Hobsbawm and E.P. Thompson, Williams broke with the moderation of post-war academia and embraced the revolutionary idealism of the 1960s, the decade in which his seminal work "Culture and Society" placed him in the top rank of literary theorists. The son of a Welsh railwayman (and later a prominent Welsh nationalist himself) Williams went on via Cambridge, the Communist Party and the Coldstream Guards to become an internationally renowned and massively influential academic, whilst ever stressing his working-class credentials and harbouring a Marxist's distrust for power and authority.
With access to Williams' private notebooks, working drafts and previously unpublished material, Smith provides an absorbing account of Raymond Williams' childhood upbringing in rural Wales, his intellectual struggles with Communism, his remarkable service record in war-torn Europe where he saw Hamburg burn and helped liberate a concentration camp, and his even more remarkable literary achievements during the sixties and seventies. What emerges is the portrait of a great British thinker who displayed an admirable integrity and inclusiveness in the workings of both his public and private lives. It is a definitive biography of the life and works of one of Britain's most influential literary scholars of the twentieth century. "Raymond Williams' Culture and Society" is a classic text still widely used on UK and US university literature courses today. It is written with access to Williams' private notebooks and other unpublished materials.
- ISBN10 0413636208
- ISBN13 9780413636201
- Publish Date 7 June 2007
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 20 March 2007
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Methuen Publishing Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 400
- Language English