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  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191284
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 196

The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence



A brilliantly perceptive study of the English novel in the 1840s

Raymond Williams begins his brilliantly perceptive study of the English novel in the 1840s, a period of rapid social change brought on by the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democratic reform, and the growth of cities and towns. Unsettling, indeed critical, for individuals and communities alike, this process of change prompted the novelists of the time to explore new forms of writing. The genius of Dickens, the powerful originality of the Bront? sisters, the passionate vision of George Eliot – all gave new force and humanity to the English novel, whose roots in the evolving community Raymond Williams proceeds to trace through the work of Hardy, Gissing and Wells, and on to D.H. Lawrence.

  • Published: 30 November 2013
  • ISBN: 9781448191284
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 196

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.

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Praise for The English Novel From Dickens To Lawrence

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
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