After Raymond Williams , livre ebook

131

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English

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2013

Écrit par
Hywel Dix

Publié par
University of Wales Press

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131

pages

English

Ebook

2013

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Publié par

University of Wales Press

Date de parution

15 septembre 2013

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781783165759

Langue

English

This volume is not only a detailed look at some of the writing produced in Scotland and Wales in the years surrounding political devolution, it also include a look at the ways in which difference sub-cultural commuities use fiction to renegotiate their relationships with the British whole.

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Publié par

University of Wales Press

Date de parution

15 septembre 2013

Nombre de lectures

EAN13

9781783165759

Langue

English

After Raymond Williams
Writing Wales in English
CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies
General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (CREW, Swansea
University)
This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, and, along with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW s Honorary Associates. Grateful thanks are extended to Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.
Other titles in the series
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)
Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)
Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisted (978-0-7083-1892-8)
Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)
Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)
Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and
Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)
After Raymond Williams:
Cultural Materialism and the
Break-Up of Britain
Writing Wales in English
HYWEL ROWLAND DIX
Hywel Rowland Dix, 2013
Originally published in 2008
New edition published 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without clearance from the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff, CF10 4UP.
www.wales.ac.uklpress
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-26640
e.ISBN 978-1-78316-575-9
The right of Hywel Rowland Dix to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988
Cover image: Ooze Forth, My Sweet (Alt 17) Clifford Hayes
C ONTENTS
General Editor s Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Foreword to the New Edition
Introduction: Williams 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
G ENERAL E DITOR S P REFACE
The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote a better understanding of the literature s significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English world-wide. In addition, it will seek to make available the scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of advanced, informed study.
M. Wynn Thomas,
Director, CREW (Centre for Research into the English Language and Literature of Wales)
Swansea University
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book began life as a doctoral thesis at the University of Glamorgan. I would like to thank Jane Aaron and Jeff Wallace for giving me the opportunity to undertake the research which led to its writing. Both of them have been extremely generous in their time and in their criticism of early drafts of the project.
Other friends and colleagues who made the University of Glamorgan a stimulating and supportive environment in which to carry out research were Steve Blandford, Gavin Edwards, Claire Flay, Diana Wallace, Alyn Webley and Martin Willis.
I am grateful to Professor Dai Smith, currently of Swansea University, for giving me the opportunity to view certain Raymond Williams manuscripts first-hand, and for taking the time to comment on early versions of some of this work.
It would have been impossible to produce a study of this kind without engaging explicitly with Tom Nairn s seminal book The Break-Up of Britain, as well as with the entire Raymond Williams oeuvre. My debt to both writers is fully acknowledged.
Ever since publication of the first edition of After Raymond Williams my most generous and loving reader has been my partner Rosemary Edwards whose willingness to listen to me trying out ideas made it seem worth writing them up. Finally, I would like to thank my family, Lesley Dix, Andrew Dix and Gareth Dix for showing an enthusiastic and encouraging attitude throughout the period of research. In a real sense, my first experiences of crossing the many different internal borders of the United Kingdom were provided by my grandfather Leslie Davies. It saddens me more than I can say that he did not survive to see this project completed.
A BBREVIATIONS
A full bibliographic entry is provided the first time each book by Raymond Williams is referred to in the text. Thereafter, the following abbreviations are used:
BC
Border Country (1960)
CC
The Country and the City (1973)
CS
Culture and Society (1958)
DIB
Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968)
DIE
Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952)
EN
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970)
FM
The Fight for Manod (1979)
L
Loyalties (1985)
LR
The Long Revolution (1961)
ML
Marxism and Literature (1977)
PF
Preface to Film (1954)
PL
Politics and Letters (1979)
PM
The Politics of Modernism (1989)
PMC
Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980)
RH
Resources of Hope (1988)
SG
Second Generation (1984)
T
Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974)
T2000
Towards 2000 (1983)
V
The Volunteers (1978)
WCS
What I Came to Say (1989)
WS
Writing in Society (1984)
WSW
Who Speaks for Wales? (2003)
F OREWORD TO THE N EW E DITION
Since the first edition of this book was published, there have been a number of important developments in the political process of devolution around the United Kingdom. In Wales, the nationalist political party Plaid Cymru experienced its first period of office in the so-called One Wales Assembly coalition with the Welsh Labour Party between 2007 and 2011. During the same period, the limited legislative powers introduced by the 2006 Government of Wales Act were enhanced after the 2011 referendum on law-making powers, resulting in the Welsh Assembly s status being increased to that of Welsh Government. In Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness of the Irish Republican political party Sinn F in retained the position of Deputy First Minister in the province s power-sharing Executive following the 2011 Assembly election, in which the party increased both its share of the popular vote and its number of seats. In Scotland, the Scottish National Party has become a party of government and a timetable has been set for holding a referendum on potential independence from the rest of the United Kingdom. Indeed, it seems likely that of the many different questions being asked of British political life in the second decade of the twenty-first century, one with among the most far-reaching implications will be: what will the people of Scotland vote?
It will be argued here that this question has political and cultural consequences that extend far beyond the Scottish border. It will also be argued, however, that behind the question, What will the people of Scotland vote? lies another question of almost equal contemporary cultural importance. This second question is not what will the Scottish people vote, but how will they decide). To move from the surface question relating to the potential outcome of a proposed referendum to a deeper theoretical question about how the electorate will make their decisions is to open up important further questions of criteria, experience, judgement and evidence: what are the benchmarks by which the Scottish people will measure their sense of nationhood? How will they identify and articulate those benchmarks? Is Scottish nationalism a phenomenon that can only be extrapolated through political separatism, or does it have a cultural element that is able to flourish with or without full independence? What in any case is the relationship between a national culture and the politics of national independence movements? These are the questions that the Scottish voters will have to ask themselves when deciding whether or not to vote for full political independence from the rest of the United Kingdom. In other words, just as answering the question, What will the Scottish people vote? has major implications for the future of the United Kingdom, so too answering the question, How will the Scottish people decide? will be hardly any less significant in revealing the different definitions and approaches to nationalism in contemporary Scotland - and other parts of the United Kingdom.
The shift in emphasis from What will the Scottish people vote? to How will the Scottish people decide? reveals that the political question, like perhaps all political questions, has to be interrogated before it can be answered, inviting us to wonder not just what decision the Scottish electorate will make, but what mental process the voters will go through in order to make their minds up. Two of the arguments presented by this book are that the Welsh writer Raymond Williams advocated the extension of participatory democracy through the enfranchisement of a culturally literate populace, and that this has implications for the political process known as devolution. The book will explore how political and cultural judgements inform each other, and how Williams attempted to theorize the relationship between the two in a complex manner that he referred to as cultural materialism. It will argue that the dialectical relationship that exists between culture and politics has been pivotal in bringing about a gradual increase in