Problems in materialism and culture: selected essays

Raymond Williams's many books-from Reading and Criticism to Marxism and Literature-are well known and, with very few exceptions, widely available. Less generally known, however, are the numerous essays that have accompanied them. Anticipating or developing the themes of the major works, augmenting them with more detailed studies or extending their methods into new areas of research, these essays are a crucial component of Williams's writing as a whole. Problems in Materialism and Culture now makes this dimension of his work available to the wider readership of his full-length books, in compact and representative form.

Of the fourteen essays gathered here, the earliest dates from the period of The Long Revolution, the most recent-on Rudolf Bahro's Alternative-from New Year, 1980. Their occasions are lectures and book-reviews as well as relatively independent and long-standing contexts of research. In mode the volume ranges from abstract theoretical exposition to concrete historical analysis, from, specialist investigation through collaborative dissent to engaged polemic. Its topics include literature and drama; theories of culture and of nature; dominant and subordinate, celebrated and marginal forms of cultural production; structural features of late-capitalist society and of the socialist order beyond it; the related political problems of contesting the one and constructing the other. Devoted to the theoretical elaboration of a 'cultural materialism', in the political perspective of socialist 'cultural revolution', these essays register both the exceptional range and the singular commitment of their author, over twenty years of unflagging intellectual production.