Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters PDF
Preview Raymond Williams: Politics, Education, Letters
RAYMOND WILLIAMS Raym.ond William.s: Politics, Education, Letters Edited by W. John Morgan Senior Lecturer in Politics and Education Department ofA dult Education University ofN ottingham and Peter Preston Lecturer in Literature Department ofA dult Education University ofN ottingham lSOth YEAR M St. Martin's Press Introduction, editorial matter and selection © W. John Morgan and Peter Preston 1993 Chapters 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 © The Macmillan Press Ltd 1993 Chapter 2 © John Mcilroy 1993 Chapter 3 © Roger Fieldhouse 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published in Great Britain 1993 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-22806-5 ISBN 978-1-349-22804-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-22804-1 First published in the United States of America 1993 by Scholarly and Reference Division, ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-08357-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Raymond Williams: politics, education, and letters I edited by W. John Morgan and Peter Preston. p. em. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-08357-1 1. Williams, Raymond-Political and social views. 2. Politics and literature-Great Britain-History-20th century. 3. Wales in literature. 4. Williams, Raymond. I. Morgan, W. John. II. Preston, Peter. PR6073.14329Z88 1993 828'.91409-dc20 92-34122 CIP For Maxine and Lewis Rebecca and Ben our children, Welsh and English Contents Acknowledgements viii Notes on the Contributors ix 1 Introduction 1 W. John Morgan and Peter Preston 2 Teacher, Critic, Explorer 14 John Mcilroy 3 Oxford and Adult Education 47 Roger Fieldhouse 4 Contributions to the Long Revolution: Raymond Williams and the Politics of the Postwar New left 65 Seth Moglen 5 Cultural Materialism: A Summary of Principles 88 H. Gustav Klaus 6 Language, Nature and the Politics of Materialism: Raymond Williams and D. H. Lawrence 105 Jeff Wall ace 7 Present Consciousness of a Practical Kind: Structure of Feeling and Higher Education Drama 129 Mick Wallis 8 Reaching for Control: Raymond Williams on Mass Communication and Popular Culture 163 Jim McGuigan 9 'Not going back, but ... exile ending': Raymond Williams's Fictional Wales 189 James A. Davies Index 211 vii Acknowledgements The editors wish to thank the contributors for their patience and understanding during a project which has been a long time in the making; T. M. Farmiloe and Margaret Cannon at Macmillan for their support and advice; Valery Rose, our copy-editor; Wendy Sharpe and Margaret Cook for their help with typing and other administra tive matters; and Joyce Morgan for compiling the index. viii Notes on the Contributors James A. Davies is Senior Lecturer in English at the University College of Swansea. He has published studies of John Forster, Dylan Thomas and Charles Dickens and edited The Heart of Wales, an anthology of Welsh writing. Roger Fieldhouse is Professor of Adult Education at the University of Exeter. Among his many publications are Adult Education and the Cold War: Liberal Values under Siege and an edited collection, The Political Education of Servants of the State. H. Gustav Klaus is Professor of English at the University of Osnabrock in Germany. His publications include The Literature of Labour: 200 Years of Working-Class Writing and an edited collection, The Socialist Novel in Britain. Jim McGuigan is Principal Lecturer in Communication Studies at the University of Coventry. He is the co-editor of Cultural Studies: An Introductory Reader and he has also published Cultural Populism. John Mcilroy is Senior Staff Tutor in Industrial Relations in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at the University of Manchester. He has published widely on both adult education and industrial relations, including The Permanent Revolution? Conservative Law and the Trade Unions. Seth Moglen is completing his PhD in American literature and cultural studies at the University of California at Berkeley. He is co editor of Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years On. W. John Morgan is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Education in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he specialises in modern social history and the comparative study of social policy and education. Among his publications are The Welsh Dilemma, Politics and Consen sus in Modern Britain and Social Welfare in the British and West German Coal Industries. ix Notes on the Contributors X Peter Preston is Lecturer in Literature in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham. He has published arti cles and reviews on the history of adult education and nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction, and has a particular interest in the work of D. H. Lawrence. In 1980, 1985 and 1990 he organised inter national conferences on Lawrence, is editor of the Journal of the D. H. Lawrence Society and has recently become Convenor of a new D. H. Lawrence Centre at the University of Nottingham. His publications include D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World (co-edited with Peter Hoare), The Literature of Place (co-edited with Norman Page) and A D. H. Lawrence Chronology. Jeff Wallace is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. His research interests include literature and science and D. H. Lawrence and he is co-editor of a forthcoming series, Texts in Culture. Mick Wallis is Lecturer in Drama in the Department of English and Drama at Loughborough University. He is co-editor with Simon Shepherd of Coming on Strong: Gay Politics and Culture and Joint Series Editor of Nottingham Drama Texts. 1 Introduction W. JOHN MORGAN and PETER PRESTON The tributes following the death of Raymond Williams in January 1988 made large claims for his standing and significance. Francis Mulhern described him as 'the outstanding intellectual in British culture this century', while Stuart Hall argued that his work repres ented 'the most sustained engagement with the central domains of English culturallife'.1 Terry Eagleton wrote of his transformation of socialist cultural studies from 'the relative crudity of 1930s Marx ism to an impressively rich, subtle and powerful body of theory', a point echoed by Mary Joannou, who further argued that this body of work 'has no equivalent in English this century'.2 Together with this sense of Williams's importance in British cul tural studies there went an appreciation of the range and variety of his work, covering as it does literary criticism (of drama, poetry and fiction), the history of literary forms, the history of ideas, film, tele vision and media studies, and studies in semantic history, as well as his own fiction and drama. As more than one writer has pointed out, he always occupied the academic border country, that area where the traditional disciplines so often conflict, but where in Williams's hands they are brought into fruitful conjunction. In this respect, Williams undoubtedly played a central role in the development of teaching in further, adult and higher education from the 1950s. Reading and Criticism (1950) and Preface to Film and Drama in Performance (both published in 1954) grew out of his experience in adult education and were aimed at his fellow-practitioners. Com munications, published in 1962, was influential in 'liberal studies' teaching in further education colleges. The longer studies, Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) and later The Coun try and the City (1973) also arose to some extent from his adult teaching and demonstrated for many teachers the ways in which the boundaries between subjects might begin to be dissolved. As the debate on theory, the canon and the curriculum gathered pace in 1
The list of books you might like
