Marxism and Literature (Raymond Williams)

“This book is written in a time of radical change. Its subject, Marxism and Literature. is part of this change. Even twenty years ago, and especially in the English·speaking countries, it would have been possible to assume, on the one hand. that Marxism is a settled body of theory or doctrine, and, on the other hand, that Literature is a settled body of work. or kinds of work, with known general Qualities and properties. A book of this kind might then reasonably have explored problems of the relations between them or, assuming a certain relationship, passed Quickly to specific applications. The situation is now very different. Marxism, in many fields. and perhaps especially in cultural theory has experienced at once a significant revival and a related openness and flexibility of theoretical development. Literature, meanwhile, for related reasons, has become problematic in quite new ways.” (from the introduction)

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Keywords (Raymond Williams)

“In 1945, after the ending of the wars with Germany and Japan, I was released from the Army to return to Cambridge. University term had already begun, and many relationships and groups had been formed. It was in any case strange to travel from an artillery regiment on the Kiel Canal to a Cambridge college. I had been away only four and a half years, but in the movements of war had lost touch with all my university friends. Then, after many strange days, I met a man I had worked with in the first year of the war, when the formations of the 1930s, though under pressure, were still active. He too had just come out of the Army. We talked eagerly, but not about the past. We were too much preoccupied with this new and strange world around us. Then we both said, in effect simultaneously: ‘the fact is, they just don’t speak the same language.’” (part of the Introduction)

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