Summary
Contents
Subject index
‘His wealth of scholarship and sharp insights make this a very fine book indeed. It is probably the fullest statement of Raymond Williams's enduring influence upon cultural studies’ — Jim McGuigan, University of Loughborough. ‘An accessible, engaging book’ — TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. This important book traces the continuing influence on contemporary cultural studies of the kinds of cultural materialism developed by Raymond Williams and his successors. Williams now often appears in cultural studies as a vaguely remembered ‘founding father’, rather than a theorist whose work is still actively relevant to our present condition. Milner's book restores Williams to a central position in relation to the formation and development of cultural studies. It stresses the differences between Williams and that other founding father, Richard Hoggart, arguing that the label ‘culturalism’ cannot properly be applied to both. It argues that Williams stands in an essentially analogous relation to the British ‘culturalist’ tradition as do Foucault and Bourdieu to French structuralism and Habermas to German critical theory and that his cultural materialism is not so much culturalist as positively ‘post-culturalist’. To those who have complained that contemporary cultural studies is insufficiently concerned with history, embeddedness and political economy, Milner suggests that this is so, in part, because Williams has become such a neglected resource. The book is a much needed reappraisal of the Williams approach, correcting misinterpretations and demonstrating its singular relevance to the problems and potentials facing cultural studies today. What emerges most powerfully is a logically consistent and penetrating way of ‘doing cultural studies’ that successfully challenges many of the dominant approaches in the field.
From Culture to Society
From Culture to Society
I see this cultural revolution as part of a great process of human liberation, comparable in importance with the industrial revolution and the struggle for democracy … The essential values … are common to the whole process: that men should grow in capacity and power to direct their own lives – by creating democratic institutions, by bringing new sources of energy to human work, and by extending the expression and exchange of experience on which understanding depends. (Williams, Communications)
In Chapter 4, I will attempt to argue a relatively strong case for the theoretical originality and importance of Williams's Marxism and Literature and of the various texts from the 1970s and early 1980s that provide its intellectual frame. However, ...
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