Communications
  • Published: 21 January 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473545755
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 200

Communications

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The godfather of the political left on culture and communications

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.
  • Published: 21 January 2016
  • ISBN: 9781473545755
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 200
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About the author

Raymond Williams

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.

portrait photo of Raymond Williams

Also by Raymond Williams

Culture and Society
People Of The Black Mountains Vol.I
People Of The Black Mountains Vol.Ii
Loyalties
The Country and the City
The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence
What I Came To Say
See all

Praise for Communications

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

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

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

Independent

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

Marshall Berman

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

Tribune
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