Raymond Williams Country And The City Pdf To Excel
'ALL I KNOW IS I HAD A COW AND PARLIAMENT TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME' - A COUNTRYMAN SPEAKING OF ENCLOSUREIt was with a little trepidation that I began to read the Marxist critic Raymond Williams 35 year old book 'The Country And The City'. I need not have been worried.Its obvious that Williams, who was born in a Welsh border village, has a keen knowledge of the reality of countryside grounded in experience. He has usefully augmented this and expanded into other times and places during a life time of 'ALL I KNOW IS I HAD A COW AND PARLIAMENT TOOK IT AWAY FROM ME' - A COUNTRYMAN SPEAKING OF ENCLOSUREIt was with a little trepidation that I began to read the Marxist critic Raymond Williams 35 year old book 'The Country And The City'. I need not have been worried.Its obvious that Williams, who was born in a Welsh border village, has a keen knowledge of the reality of countryside grounded in experience.
He has usefully augmented this and expanded into other times and places during a life time of city bound study. It is this accumulated knowledge of the literature and reality of country and city as well as the relationship between the two over time that make this an interesting read.The majority of the book focuses on the country-side of the title, intelligent readings of the literature of the time against the reality of Britain's developing capitalist agricultural, the enclosure of the commons and depopulation.
Raymond Williams. Thus a model of city and country, in economic and political relationships, has gone beyond the boundaries of the nation- state, and is seen but also challenged as a model of the world. It is very significant that in its modern forms this began in England. Much of the real history of city and country,. Abstracted Adam Bede agriculture become capitalism capitalist centre character characteristic civilisation Cobbett complicated connection consciousness contrast conventional cottages country and city country-house course Crabbe crisis Daniel Deronda decisive Dickens dominant Eclogue economic eighteenth century Elizabeth Gaskell emphasis enclosure English experience farmers farming Felix Holt forms George Eliot Gilbert White Gissing green language Hardy Hardy's Hesiod houses human Ibid idea. The Country and the City by Raymond Williams, book of a lifetime: An inspiring proposal. He quotes Trotsky’s claim that the history of capitalism is the history of the victory of town over country – and then goes on to show that this is not so. Williams writes in the tradition of the English Marxists – a humane.
He never loses sight of the fact that the country is lived in and worked by people and in what context this occurs. This provides the framework for a thoughtful consideration of what would have been contemporary literature through the ages: what is written and what is not written, and how the various authors see the country.
Initially much of the material is poetry and drama, I regrettably have never had much of a head for poetry but Williams makes such poets as Oliver Goldsmith, William Wordsworth and John Clare explicable. As time progresses more of the material considered is in prose: William Cobbet, Jane Austen, George Elliot, Thomas Hardy, Lewis Grassic Gibbon for example.All this is related to developments in the City, which Williams sees as being connected to the countryside. The reality of life in the city is likewise related to the literature of the times, his consideration of Dickens made me want to re-read at least some of his works.The book ends with an extended essay on the relationship between city and countryside, and steps back to take a global view which is still immensely relevant. There is also thoughts on the future as seen from when the book was written (1973), these unfortunately are still food for thought. Overall the book is a fascinating read, though difficult at times (I had to re-read paragraphs on a few occasions) I found it worth the effort.
Well recommended, especially for members of the Countryside Alliance (do they still exist?). A great mix of literary criticism - his readings of G. Eliot and Dickens are particularly impressive - history and political agitation. Williams starts with a discussion of the pastoral mode, which is valuable in itself. But the book really gets humming when he hits the early moderns, and starts to track the different ways that pastoral themes have been used and abused by people in different times and classes.
This is in the middle portion of the book. The last few chapters finally started to ge A great mix of literary criticism - his readings of G. Eliot and Dickens are particularly impressive - history and political agitation.
Williams starts with a discussion of the pastoral mode, which is valuable in itself. But the book really gets humming when he hits the early moderns, and starts to track the different ways that pastoral themes have been used and abused by people in different times and classes. This is in the middle portion of the book. The last few chapters finally started to get a bit too preachy. Now, I don't mind some preachiness about poverty and oppression and so on, since that's always nice to have.
Raymond Williams Country And The City Pdf To Excellence
But preachiness about the 'decadent,' 'weak' tradition of 'country house' writing, which somewhat ambivalently includes Henry James, Ivy-Compton Burnett and, no doubt, Elizabeth Bowen is unnecessarily old-Marxisty. As the book draws to a close, you get the impression that Williams prefers Hardy to James, not because of any literary qualities, but because Hardy writes about threshing machines and grew up in the lower middle classes, while James writes about princesses and was a bit of a Brahmin. Now that may all be true, but then you're making judgment about who's the better political sociologist.
And to turn around and say the real heirs of Austen and so on are detective story writers is more than bit whack. There's not much doubt that detective novels are the most conservative literary form in existence, Raymond. Otherwise, 5 stars for great writing, avoiding theory b.s., and caring about books. A particularly relevant book in the era of the Trump presidency.
Williams argues effectively that 'country' and 'city' are not fixed archetypes so much as social constructs whose development is directly related to the growth of capitalism as a dominant economic mode. Cities are seen today as the bastions of capitalism. But Williams argues that capitalism was first developed and mastered in the country beginning among the aristocratic landowning class of the 16th century. The city was inextricabl A particularly relevant book in the era of the Trump presidency.
Williams argues effectively that 'country' and 'city' are not fixed archetypes so much as social constructs whose development is directly related to the growth of capitalism as a dominant economic mode. Cities are seen today as the bastions of capitalism. But Williams argues that capitalism was first developed and mastered in the country beginning among the aristocratic landowning class of the 16th century. The city was inextricably linked to this process as the center of trade and banking which these landowners depended on to consolidate wealth.
As populations exploded as a result and necessity to fuel industrialized labor, the city transformed from a place of 'civilized social transitions' of the wealthy to a den of overcrowded squalor in the popular and literary mindset. Consequently, the shrinking country became a nostalgic retreat of the bourgeois class and a location of travel to be enjoyed and observed by the wealthy.In other words, the division that we are used to today (country = backwards but beautiful/city = progressive but ugly) is not actually a permanent reality but a constructed reality of the dominant landowning class. The meanings of both have shifted to serve the dominant narratives most useful to the ruling class at the time.Why this seems particularly relevant to me in the Trump era is due to the exploitation of this division yet again by the Republicans and most shamefully by Trump. The Republicans have convinced rural populations that reality is black and white. They've flattered rural populations with an image of their own superior and unadulterated moral simplicity compared to the corruption of the city folk. They've cast the cities as dens of filth both moral and physical, dominated by elite intellectuals who disregard the opinions of so-called bumpkins. And are they wrong?
Or have America's intellectual elites not long disregarded and ignored the plight of the rural poor for decades, looking only to the plight of the urban proletariat as in need of redemption.Trump's stroke of genius (if you can call it genius or just his usual 'idiot savant' happenstance) is to have aligned the interests of the rural populace with those of the coal miners and dispossessed factory workers. In other words, Trump has exploited a commonality between the country and the city which has always existed but which most liberal elites have regrettably ignored. Williams proves that in fact the woes of country and city have always been the same. The process of the exploitation of the farmer is no different from the exploitation of the factory worker from the exploitation of the urban service industry worker. Trump erased the division between the country and the city and created a powerful coalition that voted against their own self-interests.
Liberals if they decry this as stupidity of simple country folk and blue collar America will continue to fuel their own demise. What they need to do instead is to see the commonality of the poor across the country and the city.
Exploitation is no different regardless of geographical location. Williams shows that liberals calling for a socialist revolution will continue to be deluded if they couch it in the traditional socialist terms of industrialization and development. Rather than seeking equality for the sake of making everyone a suburban/urban bourgeois citizen, we need to seriously reevaluate our relationship to the very land itself. Development and militarization are quickly spiraling out of control, and our global self-destruction is assuredly soon if we don't halt it quickly.
What we need instead is a society without 'progress' in the sense of continued exploitation of people and resources. We need a society of community. A society of genuine connection to nature and to each other.The wonderful thing is that Williams shows that hope is possible. At each successive economic development that has propagated more division between country and city, there has been also an opportunity for genuine human collectivization and empathy. It's evident in writers like Dickens who saw the novel as an opportunity to remove the veil of separation that urban life had lowered over people's eyes. It's evident in writers like DH Lawrence who saw in natural and urban settings alike a chance to surrender oneself to deep emotive experiences and childlike return to wonder and awe (experiences which capitalism abhors). It's evidence in post-colonial writers like Achebe, who have reminded us that colonialism has turned third world nations into the new rural (with none of the nostalgia we apply to our own domestic country side - another division which has been gainfully exploited through anti-globalist xenophobic rhetoric).Williams offers hope by reminding us that each development of capitalism offers choices.
There's no inevitability. Rapid urbanization in the 19th century fostered artistic developments that radicalized our ability to empathize with our fellow man (novel being one of the best examples).
The same urbanization fostered the unionization and collectivization (that is is now so dangerous under attack). Capitalism is a maze of successive doors. At each turn in the maze we encounter one door wide open and one door seemingly locked. If we bother to search, the key to the locked door is usually hidden in plain sight. We have to choose to see it. Perhaps the internet will be the new key to fostering empathy and collectivism (or perhaps we'll allow Facebook tribalism to continue to drag us down into petty reality show style infighting).Williams is honest that the fight isn't easy.
It's easy to be paralyzed by the apparent intransigence of humanity to reform itself. However, he reminds us that with the environmental destruction and another impending world war on the horizon, we have little choice but to try.Literary criticism that not only changes your view of the books you read but the world around you is literary criticism of the highest caliber. Raymond Williams does not disappoint. An engaging Marxist critique of mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century literature concerning the countryside and the emerging cities. Despite its age it doesn’t feel dated, although I would have enjoyed criticism of more female writers beyond primarily Austen and George Eliot. Although Williams speaks of the city as an inevitable product of capitalism, he doesn’t go on to demonise city life which I found quite refreshing, as that kind of reading of the city feels lazy.
For a hefty 400 page cri An engaging Marxist critique of mostly eighteenth and nineteenth century literature concerning the countryside and the emerging cities. Despite its age it doesn’t feel dated, although I would have enjoyed criticism of more female writers beyond primarily Austen and George Eliot.
Although Williams speaks of the city as an inevitable product of capitalism, he doesn’t go on to demonise city life which I found quite refreshing, as that kind of reading of the city feels lazy. For a hefty 400 page critical work, this is a very approachable text. An effective and even virtuosic application of Marxist cultural analysis. Williams scrutinizes a privileged tradition of representing country and city alike in English literature. He's interested in the images of the country and the city that dominate our cultural imagination.
Many of these-from the country-house poems of Early Modern England, where fish jump cheerfully into nets and stags offer themselves up with perverse altruism, to the sentimental idealizations of pastoral verse-gloss over An effective and even virtuosic application of Marxist cultural analysis. Williams scrutinizes a privileged tradition of representing country and city alike in English literature. He's interested in the images of the country and the city that dominate our cultural imagination.
Many of these-from the country-house poems of Early Modern England, where fish jump cheerfully into nets and stags offer themselves up with perverse altruism, to the sentimental idealizations of pastoral verse-gloss over the arduous labor expended in working the land and farming. Williams is interested in the way representations of the country have obfuscated the exploitative class dynamics that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries with the onset of agrarian capitalism and land enclosures.
By recuperating the voices of working-class and farming poets, Williams foregrounds a way of looking at country life (as exploitative and harsh) that is suppressed by the hegemonic and conventional notions of the country. He's interested, too, in the way idealized images of the country and pastural life get manipulated in urban advertisements to reinforce strategic notions of the country that serve capitalism. The great British social historians of the mid-twentieth century were almost obnoxiously overachieving. Raymond Williams may not have had the star power in history that his peers Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson had, but he shared their multifaceted intellectual productivity (he was a novelist on top of being a historian, critic, and activist- I wonder if his novels are any good). And I'd say he actually mastered and interwove two fields - history and criticism - in a way that the others mastered The great British social historians of the mid-twentieth century were almost obnoxiously overachieving. Raymond Williams may not have had the star power in history that his peers Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson had, but he shared their multifaceted intellectual productivity (he was a novelist on top of being a historian, critic, and activist- I wonder if his novels are any good).
And I'd say he actually mastered and interwove two fields - history and criticism - in a way that the others mastered one (and dabbled in others).The Country and the City is notionally about depictions of the countryside (and the city it is contrasted to) in English literature. It is that, but it's more than that. It uses history - social history, the history of lived experience and changes in the basis of production and reproduction - to view literature and vice-versa, but it does more than that too. He really uses literature and history to interrogate each other. He traces the inner life of the British class structure through its literature, not not by taking the writings as prima facie evidence for a given belief or feeling common at a certain point, but by contrasting the imagery and tone of novels and poetry with what we know of the facts on the ground.Perhaps the best example of this is his treatment of the consistent theme of 'the good old days,' when good small landlords cared for their tenants and earned their respect, before big mean capitalist agriculture gave everyone the boot and created class society. Williams shows how successive generations of English writers cast that golden pastoral earlier and earlier in the past, up to at least the 14th century. But he doesn't just dismiss these feelings, either.
He interrogates the way pastoral idylls and laments (and he seems to know every piece of English literature ever produced) change over time, in structure, language, and tone, and incorporates them into his analysis of the 'structure of feeling' about class society and history, primarily in the period of the agricultural and industrial revolutions between the 17th and 19th centuries.These feelings went on to define, more than facts can, how people came to look at the past. And make decisions for the present. Williams was a socialist, and wanted to both excavate usable pasts - like the self-educated rural working people who resisted agrarian capitalism and its fantasies of contented (or better yet, doomed) small-folk - and illuminate better ways of understanding rural life, a frequent stumbling block for leftists (and sometimes a fatal one for leftists who attain power). There are, as he points out, really a lot of ways to understand it wrong. Learning to get it right the way Williams did - with immense erudition, a sharp critical eye, and deep empathy - sounds hard but also rewarding (and maybe necessary?).There's things to nitpick - his stuff on the city seems comparatively perfunctory next to his country material - but all in all it's a masterful work, and deeply felt.
Williams was a Welsh working-class country boy before going to Cambridge and becoming an academic, and he sees himself as providing lineaments for understanding the countryside (one wonders how he got along with Hobsbawm, a consummate urbanite even if he did help gentrify rural Wales). The Country and the City helps give the lie to the idea that social history has to be ignorant of culture, or drily written. The most interesting thing Williams presents is the durability of the rosy past, a thesis that he hammers home in the first few chapters that look at early modern England. The rest of the book shows the smaller changes that occur in English literature through the subsequent centuries, ending at about H.G. I admit that after on hundred and fifty pages the work grew tedious for me. This was largely because the structure of the book eluded me.
Where was it going, besides forward in time? One The most interesting thing Williams presents is the durability of the rosy past, a thesis that he hammers home in the first few chapters that look at early modern England. The rest of the book shows the smaller changes that occur in English literature through the subsequent centuries, ending at about H.G. I admit that after on hundred and fifty pages the work grew tedious for me. This was largely because the structure of the book eluded me. Where was it going, besides forward in time?
One major flaw is that the underlying theory was not well explained. I had to consult his 1977 Marxism and Literature in order properly understand 'structure of feeling.' In this book Williams continuously alludes to a 'shift in the structure of feeling.'
There seem to be so many shifts that I have a hard time believing that there was ever anything that could properly be called a structure. Another important concept for Williams, also not explained in this book, is 'practical consciousness,' which is the actual progressive yet durable understandings and feelings of the farm laborers, the writers, and people in general. Williams praises most the writers of the country who have their own experience with farm labor, because such authors refuse to either romanticize or fully condemn the labor - they see it, nay they understand it, in all of its agonies and occasional joys. Reading this book also inspired me to watch some of the film adaptations of the works covered in this book.
Lots of sheep. Wide-reaching, compelling, and endearing. 'At every point we need to put these ideas of the country and of the city to the historical realities, at times to be confirmed, at times denied. But also, as we see the whole process, we need to put the historical realities to the ideas, for at times these express, not only in disguise and displacement but in effective mediation or in offered and sometimes effective transcendence, human interests and purposes for which there is no other immediately av Wide-reaching, compelling, and endearing. 'At every point we need to put these ideas of the country and of the city to the historical realities, at times to be confirmed, at times denied. But also, as we see the whole process, we need to put the historical realities to the ideas, for at times these express, not only in disguise and displacement but in effective mediation or in offered and sometimes effective transcendence, human interests and purposes for which there is no other immediately available vocabulary.' Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic.
He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic.
He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.