Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams influenced generations. He was an academic, novelist and critic whose writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature laid the foundations for the modern discipline of cultural studies.

Spokesman Books' new edition of The Country and the City makes available, once again, a seminal work. We also distribute Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, published by The Raymond Williams Society.

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The Raymond Williams Foundation (RWF) is a Charity whose commitments are specifically within the sphere of Adult Education. Williams spent many years teaching adult students who came to him through the WEA and his extensive range of essays and lectures on education offer a searching analysis of the conditions for a genuine learning society.

<span style='font-size: 14px;'>Culture and Society</span>

Culture and Society
by Raymond Williams

A clear new edition of Williams's classic text is long overdue. Following our acclaimed edition of The Country and the City, published in 2011, Spokesman are pleased to add Culture and Society to our list. Raymond Williams's voice resonates strongly in the new era that he anticipated in some of his later writings.

'The organising principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinking in the period which we commonly describe as that of the Industrial Revolution. The book is an attempt to show how and why this happened. It thus becomes an account and interpretation of our responses in thought and feeling to the changes in English society since the late eighteenth century. Only in such a context can our use of the word 'culture', and the issues to which the word refers, be adequately understood.'

Raymond Williams, from his Foreword

'The idea of culture is not so much what must be learnt as the warning that there is nevertheless something to learn. That is the most general argument of Williams's classic, and one that, fifty years on, still claims us.'
Francis Mulhern, New Left Review

'Culture, I realised, was not just some decoration for the lives of an élite. The word has it origin in something that every gardener knows - the tending of natural growth. This applies to everyone, however well or badly we are tended. There is a common culture in every society.'
Michael Barratt Brown from his new Foreword

Price: £19.95

364 pages | Indexed

ISBN: 978 0 85124 8189

Paperback

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<span style='font-size: 14px;'>The Country and the City</span>

The Country and the City
by Raymond Williams

A brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes toward country and city, Raymond Williams's perceptive study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two tradtional poles of life throughout the major developmental period of English culture. The author, who was a foremost social and cultural critic, finds the English experience especially significant because of the early occurrence of the Industrial Revolution, which so decisively transformed relations between the country and the city. This new edition makes available, once again, a seminal work.

'A long, painstaking and beautiful examination of English literature in the search for shifting images of "country" and "city" through history and the often class-freighted and ahistorical meanings we give them. I challenge anyone to read his first chapter and not be eager to go on. As with Joyce and Irishness, so Williams with Welshness: two national cultural elements in my own background that have resonated within my own thought and work.' Trevor Griffiths

' ... Raymond Williams still speaks to us, at the start of the 21st century, as a roadman cutting and clearing the choked thoroughfares of our culture, a signalman indicating passable routes through the social, economic and political histories that shaped him - and us.' Stan Smith, from his new Foreword

Reviews
Patrick Parrinder - EA Newsletter 200, Summer 2012
Houman Barekat - Working USA, March 2012
and Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2012.

Price: £19.95

336 pages | Indexed

ISBN: 978 0 85124 7991

Paperback

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Spokesman Books | Raymond Williams