Raymond Williams

A worker is killed in the striking coalfields of south Wales. Some months later a government minister suspected of being connected with the death is shot. Lewis Redfern, once a radical, now a political analyst and journalist, pursues the killer, a lonely hunt that leads him through a maze of government leaks and international politics to a secret organization: a source of insurrection far more powerful than anyone could have suspected. A compelling thriller, The Volunteers is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty for through his obsessive pursuit of justice, Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

Harry Price has worked for years as a railway signalman in the Welsh border village of Glynmawr. Now he has had a stroke, and his son, Matthew, a lecturer at Oxford, returns to the close-knit community that he left.As Harry lies in silent pain in his cramped bedroom, Matthew experiences the jarring familiarity of the childhood world which, alienated, he can no longer re-enter. Struggling with the unspoken tensions and losses that returning home has provoked, he recalls what has made him who he is. Upstairs his deeply thoughtful father recalls his own arrival in the village, the relationships between men during the General Strike, and the social and personal changes that followed, and he struggles to articulate all that has been left unsaid. A beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son, and of the strength and resilience of a small community, Border Country is Raymond Williams finest novel.

Raymond Williams was one of the worlds leading cultural critics. With this book, Williams brilliantly documents the exciting birth of the popular press, and explores the growth of the reading public in English-speaking culture in Western Society. The Long Revolution of the title is the third revolution of culture after the democratic revolution and the industrial revolution. Almost uniquely, Williams work bridged the divides between aesthetic and socio-economic inquiry, between Marxist thought and mainstream liberal thought, and between the modern and post-modern world.Continuing the theme he began so successfully in Culture and Society, Williams examines the gradual change, which took over our political, economic, and cultural life. He placed special emphasis on the creative mind in relation to social and cultural thinking. After discussing the theory of culture he turns to a fascinating historical study of such institutions as education and the press, traces the development of a common language, and reveals the links between ideas, literary forms, and social history.

"Si dijéramos que los libros se han constituido como objetos-fetiche en la sociedad moderna, estaríamos, probablemente, exagerando. Desde luego que este tipo de comportamiento puede exhibirs

A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founder of the approach that has come to be known as "cultural materialism." Yet Williams' method was always open-ended and fluid, and this volume collects together his most significant work from over a twenty-year period in which he wrestled with the concepts of materialism and culture and their interrelationship. Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams' identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism

Narrativa

Considered to be the founding father of British cultural theory, Williams was concerned throughout his life to apply a materialist and socialist analysis to all forms of culture, defined generously and inclusively as structures of feeling. In this major work, Williams applies himself to the problem of modernism. Rejecting stereotypes and simplifications, he is especially preoccupied with the ambivalent relationship between revolutionary socialist politics and the artistic avant-garde. Judiciously assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the modernist project, Williams shifts the framework of discussion from merely formal analysis of artistic techniques to one which grounds these cultural expressions in particular social formations. Animating the whole book is the question which Williams poses and brings us significantly closer to answering: namely, what does it mean to develop a cultural analysis that goes beyond the modern and yet avoids the trap of postmodernism s new conformism ?"

Raymond Williams has made a central contribution to the culture of the Left in the English-speaking world. Politics and Letters is a volume of interviews with Williams, conducted by members of the New Left Review editorial committee, that is designed to bring into clear focus the major theoretical and political issues posed by his work. Introduced by novelist Geoff Dyer, Politics and Letters ranges across his biographical development, the evolution of his cultural theory and literary criticism, his work on dramatic forms and his fiction, and an exploration of British and international politics.

Raymond Williams' reputation rests mainly on his contribution to literary and cultural studies, but he was also an important critic and theoretician in the field of drama. "Drama in Performance", first published in 1954, pioneered a method of dramaturgical rather than literary-critical analysis of plays, locating dramatic texts in the conditions and conventions of their original performance and reading them to disclose their performance potentialities. This method, which anticipated such contemporary developments as performance analysis and the semiotics of drama, is here applied to representative texts from key periods of the history of drama: the Greek stage, the medieval theatre-in-the-round and pageant-wagon, the Elizabethan public playhouse, London commercial theatres from the Restoration to the late 19th century, the naturalist stage of the Moscow Art Theatre, 20th century experimental drama, and contemporary film. This edition presents the text as Williams revised it in 1966.In addition it provides an updated bibliography of work in this field, a complete listing of all Williams' relevant writings, and a new Introduction (by Graham Holderness) which locates the book both within modern dramatic theory and criticism and within Williams' own work and demonstrates its continuing challenge and relevance.

As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

Who Speaks for Wales? is the first collection of Raymond Williams' writings on Welsh culture, literature, history and politics. It brings together material that has long been overlooked by commentators on his work, and emphasises both the centrality of his Welshness to his work as a whole, and the continuing relevance of his thought for post-devolution Wales. Daniel Williams's introduction offers an original reading of Raymond Williams's career from a Welsh perspective and underlines the ways in which his engagement with Welsh issues makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on nation, race and class. Who Speaks for Wales? will be essential reading for everyone interested in questions of identity, nationhood and ethnicity in Britain and beyond.

Power and politics corrupt...this is the future. A worker is killed in the striking coalfields of south Wales. Some months later a government minister suspected of being connected with the death is shot. Lewis Redfern, once a radical, now a political analyst and journalist, pursues the killer, a lonely hunt that leads him through a maze of government leaks and international politics to a secret organization: a source of insurrection far more powerful than anyone could have suspected - the world of the Volunteers. A compelling thriller, 'The Volunteers' is also an engrossing reminder of the conflict between moral choice and political loyalty for through his obsessive pursuit of justice, Redfern finally encounters the truth about himself.

Historia de la comunicación comprende el fenómeno de la comunicación desde los primeros testimonios de la sociedad humana hasta finales del siglo XX, con la voluntad de contemplarlo a partir de diversos puntos de vista: analíticos, históricos y exploratorios, y desde ámbitos laborales y disciplinas académicas diferentes. Por esta razón se eligieron para su elaboración colaboradores de especialidades y países distintos, que definen qué es la comunicación desde sus propios campos de referencia. Si bien escriben desde sus conocimientos y experiencias particulares, este libro alcanza una unidad temática en el recorrido de la historia y el proceso de la comunicación humana. La obra se divide en dos volúmenes, siendo el nacimiento de la imprenta la frontera entre ambos. En la última parte del segundo volumen se estudian los progresos alcanzados y los que pretende alcanzar la tecnología de la comunicación, y de sus posibles efectos, llevando la historia de la comunicación hasta la generación venidera, con nuevas posibilidades y problemáticas.

En la larga revolución Raymond Williams continúa la extraordinaria indagación comenzada con Cultura y Sociedad . Publicada inicialmente en 1961, la presente sigue la edición revisada y ampliada de 1965. El titulo del libro se refiere a las transformaciones contemporaneas en la sociedad y la cultura: ´´una autentica revolucion, transformadora de hombres e instituciones; constantemente extendida y profundizada por los actos de millones de personas, continua y diversamente enfrentada por la reaccion explicita y la presion de las formas e ideas habituales. No obstante, es una revolucion dificil de definir y su dispar accion se ejerce a lo largo de un periodo tan prolongado que es casi imposible no perderse en su proceso excepcionalmente complejo´´. La interaccion multiple de la revolucion democratica y la revolucion industrial constituye uno de los nucleos problematicos del pensamiento social. Se agrega una tercera revolucion, cultural, aun mas dificil de situar e interpretar, que comprenden la extension del alfabetismo y del acceso a los modernos medios de comunicacion, que ya no quedan reducidos a grupos limitados. Al examinar los cambios economicos, politicos y culturales contemporaneos, Williams destaca especialmente la significacion de la idea creativa en su relacion con el pensamiento social y cultural. Luego de una presentacion que discute la teoria y las orientaciones de analisis de la cultura, se orienta a una investigacion iluminadora de instituciones basica como la educacion y la prensa. Un objetivo destacado, caracteristico de su metodo, apunta al desarrollo de un lenguaje comun y busca relevar las conexiones entre las ideas, las forma literarias y la historia social.

Este libro presenta los últimos trabajos (escritos entre 1979 y 1986) de uno de los principales teóricos en el ámbito de los estudios culturales ingleses. Williams discute en estos textos las líneas de una tradición alternativa, apoyada en una relectura original de las vanguardias en su marco político y sus escenarios urbanos. El autor habla de teatro, de cine, de literatura; reflexiona también sobre el futuro de los estudios culturales (de los que es uno de sus precursores), y vuelve a presentar sus hipótesis sobre la relación de interioridad que mantienen entre sí sociedad y cultura.

Con ocasión del primer número de la hoy ya clásica publicación norteamericana de economía política Monthly Review, el autor de la relatividad despliega en 1949 su rigurosa lógica científica para aplicarla al pensamiento social y revelarse como un genuino pensador a la vez socialista y humanista. Al igual que el artículo de Albert Einstein, también los escritos de Raymond Williams y Paul Sweezy argumentan de forma poderosa sobre la cada vez más urgente necesidad de modificar la perspectiva desde la que se hoy se dirigen los asuntos económicos, políticos y sociales: sólo si el bienestar del conjunto de hombres y mujeres se convierte verdaderamente en objetivo central del desarrollo será posible hablar de un futuro de la humanidad. Sin duda, a la vista de las últimas evoluciones del paisaje global, los textos que aquí se recuperan cobran ahora renovada vigencia y vuelven a incitar al lector o lectora a una viva reflexión sobre cuál ha de ser el futuro de todos y qué papel ha de jugar el socialismo en su consecución.

Todo el libro podría resumirse en una pregunta: ¿cómo el capitalismo transformó la sociedad británica? Pero esa pregunta es demasiado general y carece de un foco que la localice. Esta es precisamente la cuestión que encara Williams: concretar la pregunta espacialmente en dos miembros implicados: la ciudad y el campo; buscar la trama que hace que estas dos localizaciones se presupongan siempre, que haya, entre ellas, una comunicación tan conflictiva como inevitable. [...] Williams sostiene que el paisaje, tanto en su dimensión material como en su referencia literaria, es la producción de un tipo particular de observador, sustraído del mundo del trabajo. [...] El campo nunca es paisaje antes de la llegada de un observador ocioso que puede permitirse una distancia en relación con la naturaleza.Beatriz Sarlo, fragmento de la IntroducciónUn fundamentado y cabal intento de relacionar la literatura inglesa con el medio social. El trabajo de Williams está libre de la literalidad carente de imaginación de otros críticos o de su parcialidad, y nos ha advertido contra las falsificaciones sentimentales de la vida rural y la naturaleza.Times Literary SupplementEn El campo y la ciudad, probablemente el mejor trabajo de Williams, su capacidad intelectual y la pasión ideológica, así como su integridad personal, se aúnan de un modo más convincente que nunca.Marshall Berman, The New York Times Book Review