Culture and Materialism (Radical Thinkers Classics)

Radical Thinkers Classic Editions is a selection of Verso’s leading titles, celebrating forty years of New Left Books and Verso. Hardback and embossed with foil, these are essential new editions of the highlights from four decades of uncompromising, radical publishing.

A comprehensive introduction to the work of one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. Raymond Williams is a towering presence in cultural studies, most importantly as the founder of the approach that has come to be known as “cultural materialism.” Yet Williams’s method was always open-ended and fluid, and this volume collects together his most significant work from over a twenty-year period in which he wrestled with the concepts of materialism and culture and their interrelationship. Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams’s identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.