After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain - New Updated Edition

by Hywel Dix

Overview

Raymond Williams (1921-88) was a Welsh, working-class academic writer and novelist, influential in both the creation of cultural studies as an academic subject and in his attempts to democratize access to education. Here Hywel Dix applies Williams’s theory—that literary texts not only reflect what is happening in a society but also cause certain changes to occur—to literature and film produced in the years since Williams’s death, particularly during the years of political devolution in the United Kingdom. Dix explores the ways in which contemporary Welsh and Scottish writing contributes to devolution and how these writers carry out an imaginative critique of the unitary British state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780708326640
Publisher:	University of Wales Press
Publication date:	11/15/2013
Series:	University of Wales Press - Writing Wales in English
Edition description:	New Updated Edition
Pages:	254
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Hywel Dix is part-time lecturer in English at the University of Glamorgan.

Table of Contents

General Editor’s Preface

Acknowledgements

List of Abbreviations

Foreword to the New Edition

Introduction: Willliams and Modernity

1.   Towards a Materialism of Culture

2.   The Welsh Identity of Raymond Williams

3.   Universities – Hard and Soft

4.   Postcolonial Britain

5.   Williams, Film and the Break-Up of Britain

6.   A Reconsidered Conclusion: Post- British Williams?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Thoroughly researched, politically engaged, lucidly written and often very cleverly argued, this book is an immediately essential addition to the extensive secondary literature on Williams.”

New Welsh Review - Andrew Milner

In this book, Hywel Dix presents a succession of fresh and surprising insights into the work of Raymond Williams and into theories of post-devolutionary culture. Readable but critically astute and deeply informed, After Raymond Williams promises to reinvigorate the idea of cultural materialism.”

Jeff Wallace

Williams could not have a better advocate than Dix, whose careful reading of his work restores one of the most profound thinkers on literature and culture to our view.”

Times Literary Supplement - Gary Day

This innovative and timely study sheds light not only on the work of Raymond Williams, but also on the ongoing cultural processes of devolution in Britain.”

Jane Aaron