The Country and the City - Softcover

Williams, Raymond

Softcover

ISBN 10: 178487082X ISBN 13: 9781784870829

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2016

Synopsis

A groundbreaking work of social, literary and intellectual history by the godfather of the 'New Left.'
     Our collective notion of the city and country is irresistibly powerful. The city as the seat of enlightenment, sophistication, power and greed is in profound contrast with an innocent, peaceful, backward countryside. By examining literature since the sixteenth century, Williams traces the development of our conceptions of these two traditional poles of life. His groundbreaking study casts the country and city as central symbols for conceptualizing the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development.

About this title

About the Author:

RAYMOND WILLIAMS was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy, and was educated at the village school, at Abergavenny Grammar School, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. After serving in the war as an anti-tank captain, he became an adult education tutor in the Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies. In 1947 he was an editor of Politics and Letters, and in the 1960s was general editor of the New Thinker's Library. He was elected Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1961 and was later appointed University Professor of Drama. Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988. His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962) andTelevision: Technology and Cultural Form (1974); Drama in Performance (1954), Modern Tragedy (1966) and Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968); The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), Orwell (1971) and The Country and the City (1973); Politics and Letters (interviews) (1979) and Problems in Materialism and Culture (selected essays) (1980).

Review:

"While written with the energy of political engagement, it is a critically generous book... Even where you would read something differently, there is space to disagree" -- John Mullan * Guardian * "His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made him a major influence on three decades of political thought" * Independent * "I went back to my own edition of The Country and the City... Certain books are held dear because they are also psychic landmarks revealing where and how they helped us come into consciousness. Inevitably, our perception of the world continues to be informed by such texts long after the precise details of their contents have been forgotten." -- Geoff Dyer * New Statesman * "He was the foremost political thinker of his generation in Britain who in his most formidable books, Culture And Society, The Long Revolution and The Country and the City, redrew the map of our cultural history, and elsewhere made heroic interventions in the main political debates of his time" * Guardian * "The first thing that struck me about this book when I read it as an undergraduate was the personable charm of the narrator. Embarking on a topic which could hardly be broader or grander: the study of how literature has described the world; he starts with his own country, with his own city. His emotion about his birthplace his sense of belonging, is so powerful, that the book reads at times like an autobiography, like a love-letter to the country of his childhood" -- Philippa Gregory * Independent *

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 178487082X
• ISBN 13: 9781784870829
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344