Sociology of Literature - Cultural Materialism

Cultural Materialism

Raymond Williams was Professor of Drama at Cambridge University and one of the founders of contemporary cultural studies. He described his own distinctive approach as a 'cultural materialism', by which he meant a theory of culture 'as a (social and material) productive process' and of the arts 'as social uses of material means of production'. This is a clearly sociological, as distinct from literary-critical, perspective: hence, its most general exposition in the United States as The Sociology of Culture and in Britain as Culture, a 1981 title in Fontana's New Sociology series. Although Williams's interests ranged widely across the whole field of literary and cultural studies, his major work was concentrated on literature and drama. He was thus a sociologist of culture, specialising in the sociology of literature.

In The Long Revolution (1961), Williams developed pioneering accounts of the sociology of the book trade, the sociology of authorship and the sociology of the novel. In The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), he argued that the modern novel articulated a distinctively modern 'structure of feeling', the key problem of which was the 'knowable community'. In The Country and the City (1973) he developed a social history of English country-house poetry, aimed at demystifying the idealisations of rural life contained in the literature: 'It is what the poems are: not country life but social compliment; the familiar hyperboles of the aristocracy and its attendants'. His Marxism and Literature(1977) - simultaneously a critique of both Marxism and 'Literature' - is an extensive formal elaboration of Williams's own theoretical system.

Alan Sinfield's Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (1992) and Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (1997) are both clearly indebted to Williams. So, too, is Andrew Milner's Literature, Culture and Society (2005).