Customer Reviews

Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism (Critics of the Twentieth Century)

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I couldn't put it down. For anyone who has been touched by the work that Williams did, this is a must. Higgins takes us on a fascinating intellectual journey with Williams, painstakingly recreating the changing contexts in which Williams' ideas were formed, and giving us the tools to see how they emerged from the debates of the time, from a long struggle between socialism and individualism, which he never really resolved.

One of the problems you have with Williams as a non-academic is that he didn't write simply or clearly - he's hard work. Higgins recreates the great Williams arguments that liberated us from the straightjacket of Leavisite literary criticism, where an elite of critics determined what the "canon of literature" was, and dismissed everything that wasn't in that. The idea of all embracing culture, that culture and literature potentially includes everything that anyone writes - fantastic stuff, and very relevant today in the UK, where some of this appalling stuffiness is returning to orthodoxy with uncomfortable speed.

And in adult education , especially adult literacy, I can see that we owe him so much. I sometimes wonder if the way that the literary establishment excluded ordinary people from taking part has anything to do with the extraordinarily widespread problem in adult literacy - that most of us hate writing.

A must for anyone with a socialist perspective on education.