Page 44 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism

class, such as is canvassed in certain ‘leftist’ versions of Marxism,
remained entirely unacceptable. In studying literature, and other
cultural artefacts, Williams developed the key concept of ‘struc-
ture of feeling’. ‘In one sense’, he writes, ‘this structure of feeling
is the culture of a period: it is the particular living result of all
the elements in the general organization’ (Williams, 1965, p. 64).
He continues: ‘in this respect... the arts of a period...are of
major importance...here... the actual living sense, the deep
community that makes the communication possible, is naturally
drawn upon’ (pp. 64–5). So, for example, the English novel from
Dickens to Lawrence becomes, for Williams, one medium among
many by which people seek to master and absorb new experience
through the articulation of a structure of feeling, the key
problem of which is that of the ‘knowable community’ (Williams,
1974). Such deep community must, of course, transcend class; and
yet it remains irredeemably marked by it. For the early, ‘left
culturalist’ Raymond Williams this remained a circle that stub-
bornly refused to be squared. Only in the course of a later
encounter with ‘western Marxism’ did it finally become possible
for him to explain, to his own satisfaction at least, how it is that
structures of feeling can be common to different classes, and yet
represent the interests of some particular class.

CULTURAL MATERIALISM

Between the publication of The Long Revolution in 1961 and
Marxism and Literature in 1977, Williams’ work proceeded by way
of a series of often radically innovative encounters with an
extremely diverse set of substantive issues, ranging across the
whole field of literary and cultural studies and including
pioneering analyses of both the mass media and the literary
canon. His most powerful work of literary criticism, The Country
and the City, dates from this period. Here he argued, against the
weight of contemporary academic interpretation, for a critique,
based on ‘questions of historical fact’ (Williams, 1973, p. 12), of
such mythologising misrepresentations of rural life as those in
the tradition of English country-house poetry. The cumulative

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