The Trust is pleased to announce that Dr Phil O’Brien has now completed his project funded by the Trust transcribing, digitising, publishing, and making available online recordings of a series of Raymond Williams lectures on Marxism, literature, politics, and culture from the 1970s and 1980s.
The recordings are available here.
Four of the lecture tapes have also been transcribed for publication in a new book of Williams essays being published by Verso in January 2022: Culture and Politics: Class, Writing, Socialism. These are ‘Marxist Cultural Theory’, ‘British Working-Class Literature after 1945’, ‘Popular Forms of Writing’, and ‘When was Modernism?’.
Raymond Williams is one of Britain’s leading socialist intellectuals and theorists of socialism, Marxist literary theory, and working-class culture in Britain. He was an author, academic, literary critic, public intellectual, and a leading figure of the New Left. He was the son of working-class parents from a Welsh border village, an adult education tutor, and a Cambridge professor. He established a new mode of critical analysis, cultural materialism, grounded in a concept of culture which positions cultural practice as part of an active, dynamic, historical process. His major works include Culture and Society (1958), Border Country (1960), The Long Revolution (1961), Modern Tragedy (1966), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Marxism and Literature (1977), and Towards 2000 (1983).
https://raymondwilliams.co.uk/