Culture And Society 1780 1950

The romantic artist - Mill on bentham and coleridge - Thomas carlyle - The industrial novels - J.H. Newman and Matthew Arnold - Art and society - Interregnum - Twentieth-century opinions.

Raymond Williams, whose other works include Keywords, The Country and the City, Culture and Society, and Modern Tragedy, was one of the world’s foremost cultural critics. Almost uniquely, his work bridged the divides between aesthetic and socio-economic inquiry, between Marxist thought and mainstream liberal thought, and between the modern and post-modern world. When The Long Revolution first appeared in 1961, much of the acclaim it received was based on its prescriptions for Britain in the '60s, which form a relatively brief final section of the whole. The body of the book has since come to be recognized as one of the foundation documents in the cultural analysis of English-speaking culture. The “long revolution” of the title is a cultural revolution, which Williams sees as having unfolded alongside the democratic revolution and the industrial revolution. With this book, Williams led the way in recognizing the importance of the growth of the popular press, the growth of standard English, and the growth the reading public in English-speaking culture and in Western culture as a whole. In addition, Williams’s discussion of how culture is to be defined and analyzed has been of considerable importance in the development of cultural studies as an independent discipline. Originally published by Chatto & Windus, The Long Revolution is now available only in this Broadview Encore Edition.

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature – from George Eliot to George Orwell – Williams provides insights into the social and economic forces that have shaped British culture and society. Provocative and revolutionary in its day, this work overturned conventional thinking about the development of a common British mentality.

As cultural studies has grown from its origins on the margins of literary studies, it has tended to discard both literature and sociology in favour of the semiotics of popular culture. Literature, Culture and Society makes a determined attempt to re-establish the connections between literary studies, cultural studies and sociology. Arguing against both literary humanism and sociological relativism, it provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to textual analysis, from hermeneutics to postmodernism, and presents a substantive account of the capitalist literary mode of production. This second edition has been fully revised and rewritten, with new sections including the impact of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, and the recent work of academics such as Franco Moretti. New case studies have been added in order to examine the intertextual connections between Genesis, Milton's Paradise Lost, Frankenstein (in Mary Shelley's original and also in several film versions), Karel Capek's R.U.R., Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.