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CULTURE AND MATERIALISM
SELECTED ESSAYS
Raymond Williams
This paperback edition first published by Verso 2020
First published by Verso 1980
© Raymond Williams 1980, 2020
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13 978-1-78873-860-6
ISBN-13 978-1-78960-004-9 (US EBK)
ISBN-13 978-1-83976-307-6 (UK EBK)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Contents
A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy
Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory
Means of Communication as Means of Production
4
Social Environment and Theatrical Environment: the Case of English Naturalism
5
Notes on Marxism in Britain Since 1945
Beyond Actually Existing Socialism
‘Selected essays’ are not uncommon in English-language culture, but their rationale as a form of publication is notably variable, and often indefinite. It may be pertinent, therefore, briefly to indicate our purpose in compiling Problems in Materialism and Culture.
Raymond Williams’s many books-from Reading and Criticism to Marxism and Literature-art well known and, with very few exceptions, widely available. What are less generally known and, for evident material reasons, not nearly so accessible, 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, and it was in order to make them available to the wider readership of his full-length books that this volume was conceived.
The fourteen texts included here were chosen and arranged in the light of a related consideration. Many thousands of readers have encountered Williams’s major works as they appeared, in an intellectual acquaintanceship going back twenty years and more. But there is an increasing number for whom, inevitably, this is not the case. So large and complex a body of work can pose problems of access, for anyone – teacher or student, specialist or general reader – approaching it for the first time. It seemed important, therefore, that any selection of essays should aim to cover its entire range (apart from the novels), to compose a volume at once compact and representative.
Problems in Materialism and Culture has been designed to meet these requirements. The earliest of the essays dates from the period of The Long Revolution, having been written in 1958-59, the most recent 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 wholly abstract theoretical exposition to concrete historical analysis, from specialist research through collaborative dissent to engaged polemic. The subjects of discussion 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. The central theme – and practice – of the volume, already given in its title, is the elaboration within Marxist theory and socialist politics of a ‘cultural materialism’.
A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy, the opening essay of the book, looks back to illuminate
