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Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (Columbia University Press, 1983, originally published in 1959) Acknowledged as perhaps the masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this omnibus ranges over British literary history from George Eliot to George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Michael Harrington, one of contemporary America's dominant left-wing voices, viewed the book as "a plea for the working class idea of a collective society against the bourgeois idea of an individualist society, and for the dissemination of the culture of the past, so far as this is possible, to the entire people." Given this ideological prism, most of Williams' contemporaries lauded Culture and Society's contribution to the historiography of English culture; however, many disputed the book's conclusion, in which his class-based abstractions proved inadequate in discussing the problems of modern society. Irving Howe, writing in The New Republic, argued that "when he comes to problems that do not yield so readily to an analysis in terms of social class _ as neither authoritarianism nor mass society will _ then he flounders ÿ he is still too concerned with problems of class in an age of the total state." MORE: Excerpts from the book Culture is ordinary: Raymond Williams and cultural materialism by Phil Edwards Amazon |
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