ABSTRACT
Raymond Williams (b. 1921) was born and brought up in the Welsh border country, where his father was a railway signalman. From Abergavenny Grammar School he won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, and after service in World War II he became a tutor in adult education at Oxford University. In 1961 he was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is now University Reader in Drama. Raymond Williams has not concealed the fact that his personal experience of moving, via education, up through the English class system, has shaped his intellectual commitment to the idea of a common culture; and he has dealt with this experience directly in two novels, Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964). He has also been one of the leading theoreticians of the British New Left after World War II, editing May Day Manifesto in 1968. By his own account Marx and F. R. Leavis were the major intellectual influences upon Williams, and he has combined and modified them in a way which many postwar British literary intellectuals have found deeply appealing. Williams's insistence that all significant human activity is communal is clearly Marxist in derivation, but by seeking, in life and art, a reconciliation of the claims of the individual and society, rather than a subordination of one to another, he retains some of the values of liberal humanism. Like Leavis's, Williams's critical approach to literature assumes a close connection between art and life, and fans out into a general concern with the quality of both in modem industrial societies. Whereas Leavis and Scrutiny espoused an elitist concept of culture, however, and were invariably hostile and negative in dealing with the mass media, Williams has been more patiently objective in analysing such phenomena and more concerned to look for points of possible growth and benevolent change in contemporary culture. In this respect his work has often been linked with that of Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) (see above, pp. 488-96.) In the Foreword to Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958), Williams wrote: 'We live in an expanding culture, yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions.' Williams sought that understanding in Culture and Society by a historical analysis of the 'cultural debate' in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and more speculatively in The Long Revolution (1961). These books, which work on the frontiers of literature, sociology, history, and philosophy, are probably his best known works. He is also the author of Drama From Ibsen to Eliot (1952), Modern Tragedy (1965) and The English Novel From Dickens to Lawrence (1970).
