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10 books by Welsh authors you should read

The Country and the City

A groundbreaking work of social, literary and intellectual history by the godfather of the ‘New Left’

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

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

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.

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

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

For those who read English in the '60s, it was common to revere Williams as both a rock of integrity and a pathfinder for new ways of seeing culture, communication, class and democracy

He shows us the language and imagery, the beliefs and developed ideas, the hidden assumptions and class biases, and the 'structures of feeling' of literally hundreds of writers, major and minor, poets and pamphleteers, geniuses and hacks. . . . His erudition is immense

The re-issue of The Country and the City by Raymond Williams is welcome as a contribution to the thinking of a new generation. Well-received at the time, it now has classic status as a study in the contrasts that are known without often receiving the depth of consideration Williams gives them

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 Professor of Drama. 
 
His books include Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961) and its sequel Towards 2000 (1983); Communications (1962) and Television: 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); and four novels – the Welsh trilogy of Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979), and The Volunteers (1978). 
 
Raymond Williams was married in 1942, had three children, and divided his time between Saffron Walden, near Cambridge, and Wales. He died in 1988.

Taking inspiration from classic authors from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, Williams shines a light on our society’s changing views of the rural and industrial landscapes in which we work and live. 
 
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. 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 the social and economic changes associated with capitalist development. 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY TRISTRAM HUNT

Communications

The godfather of the political left on culture and communications

A most valuable book for anyone concerned with the estate of the chief means of communication in this country - television, films, theatre, advertising, books and magazines

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

Williams's fascinating investigation into forms of communication as they stood in 1962 - computers, radio, television, printing, photography, film - remains remarkably relevant today. The idea that reality is primary, and that communication of that reality secondary, is debunked - if we take the view that there is life, and then afterwards accounts of it, we degrade art and learning. Communications are, he argues, a major way in which reality is continually formed and changed. This is Williams's compelling introduction to modern means and institutions of communication.

The Fight For Manod

The fourth novel from the great socialist thinker

Matthew Price and Peter Owen both have their roots within the borders of Wales. Together they decide to build a new town, Manod, in the depopulated valleys of South Wales. Seemingly a splendid idea, and yet a world of plotting, scheming and resistance lies in store.

The Beginning

People Of The Black Mountains Vol.I

The sixth novel from the the great twentieth-century socialist thinker

This proud and haunting novel is the last great work of Raymond Harris, his final testament. 
 
Here, in one vast, breathtaking sweep is his story of the land where he was born, the land he loved and left, but could never forget - the story of the people of Wales and the borders, not over one or two generations but many thousands, from the very beginning of recorded time. 
 
People of the Black Mountain is a chronicle with a difference, alive with feeling, set within a night-long quest of a young man of today, searching for his grandfather lost on the high ridges. On the moonlit heights Glyn hears voices calling within him, voices which pull us back, over the rim of the years to the days of Marod and his family, sheltering in their caves and hunting horses in a misty Arctic summer. As Glyn follows the tracks the stories form a linking chain across the ages, from before the last Ice-Age to the fierce, defiant struggle against the invading Romans. 
 
Lost lives, forgotten memories, like like the arrowheads beneath close-cropped turf. Myth and magic, plague and invasion, the warmth and sadness of daily life - slowly the waves of history ebb and flow, like the oceans which long ago formed the sandstone layers at the heart of the mountains themselves. 
 
Rooted in the past yet written for the present, People of the Black Mountains is a novel unlike any other, written by one of the great men of our time: a journey in search of a buried history, following the tracks on a map that all of us can read - and walk along - today.

The Eggs of The Eagle

People Of The Black Mountains Vol.Ii

The final novel from the great twentieth-century socialist thinker

Raymond Williams' last novel is an imaginary history of Wales from Roman times to the Middle Ages. It is an expansive, profound and insightful panorama of ordinary human life, played out in the foothills of the Black Mountains.

Drama From Ibsen To Brecht

A fascinating insight into the role of theatre in society and the mechanics of dramatic language

With typical critical flair, Raymond Williams examines the development of the dramatic form from Henrik Ibsen to Bertolt Brecht. Taking an expansive view of drama from around the world, he offers the reader profound insights into the role of theatre in society and into the workings of dramatic language. This is seminal reading for theatre-goers and literature students alike.

Raymond Williams

1780–1950

Acknowledged as a masterpiece of materialist criticism, this book delves into the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination. Surveying two hundred years of history and English literature – from George Eliot to George Orwell – Williams provides insights into the social and economic forces that have shaped British culture and society. Provocative and revolutionary in its day, this work overturned conventional thinking about the development of a common British mentality.

Raymond Williams

Culture and Society

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