Spokesman Books

'Raymond Williams was one of the left's great thinkers - he deserves to be rediscovered' So asserts Geoff Dayer's recent New Statesman article. We reproduce it here. Follow this link for Spokesman Books' selection of works by Williams: http://www.spokesmanbooks.com/acatalog/Raymond_Williams.html *** A hero of the 1968 generation, Raymond Williams was inextricably linked to where he came from and common experience. In an era of diluted politics, it's time to return to his work. “I come from Pandy . . .” The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in  Politics and Letters:   Interviews with New Left Review  (1979) may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening line of Saul Bellow’s  Adventures of Augie March  – “I am an American, Chicago born . . .” – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence. Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the...

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i...

Key Words 9: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Much of this issue of Key Words has to do with border crossings. Five of the essays are the result of the willingness of colleagues in Swansea and in Tokyo to cross international borders in order to engage in a transnational discussion of Williams’s work. Three contributions focus on questions of language. While this issue is primarily about Raymond Williams’s work, his ideas and influence, this section brings two other key thinkers into the dialogue – Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Terry Eagleton, who is perhaps Williams’s foremost disciple. Contents: Editors’ Preface Signs, Socialism and Ethics: Eagleton on Language - Tony Crowley Terry Eagleton, Postmodernism and Ireland - Edward Larrissy Williams and Wittgenstein: Language, Politics and Structure of Feeling - Ben Ware Border Country: Then and Now - Simon Dentith Raymond Williams in Japan Essays by contemporary Japanese critics, edited and introduced by Daniel G. Williams Guest Editor’s Intr...

Raymond Williams influenced generations. He was an academic, novelist and critic whose writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature laid the foundations for the modern discipline of cultural studies. Spokesman Books' new edition of The Country and the City makes available, once again, a seminal work. We also distribute Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism , published by The Raymond Williams Society . Price: £19.95 ISBN: 978 0 85124 7991