Summary
Critic whom Edward Said calls a good friend and a great critic, many parts of Culture and Imperialism suffused with his ideas and his human and moral example; Said gave the first Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture in London in 1989, speaking about Camus (Culture and Imperialism, PDF p.26 / printed p.xxvii).
Details
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Portions of Culture and Imperialism first appeared in Raymond Williams: Critical Perspectives, edited by Terry Eagleton (PDF p.3).
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Williams’s phrase “structures of feeling” names what literature creates in participating in Europe’s overseas expansion: structures that support, elaborate and consolidate the practice of empire (PDF p.41 / printed p.14).
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Said’s limitation: Williams describes the 1840s as “the decisive period in which the consciousness of a new phase of civilization was being formed” and as “this transforming, liberating, and threatening time” without reference to India, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and feels English literature is mainly about England — an idea central to his work as to most scholars and critics, though Williams is not one of the scholars who write about novels exclusively (PDF p.41 / printed p.14).
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Williams’s “knowable community” of Englishmen and women is what Austen, George Eliot and Mrs. Gaskell project in shaping the idea of England, in which England was surveyed and made known whereas “abroad” was only referred to or shown briefly (PDF p.99 / printed p.72).
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In The Country and the City, which Said calls Williams’s richest book, the interplay of rural and urban places is mainly about how English culture has dealt with land; near the end Williams volunteers that from at least the mid-nineteenth century there was a larger context of England’s relationship with the colonies within which every idea and every image was consciously and unconsciously affected — yet Said ventures that an imperial map of the world in English literature turns up with amazing insistence well before the mid-nineteenth century (PDF p.109-110 / printed p.82-83).
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On Austen, Williams holds that where only one class is seen, no classes are seen, and describes the morality her novels affirm as “an everyday, uncompromising morality which is in the end separable from its social basis”; Said argues the morality is in fact not separable from its social basis, the geographical process of expansion that predates, underlies and guarantees it (PDF p.111, p.119-120 / printed p.84, p.92-93).
Related pages
Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, Structure of attitude and reference