Raymond Williams (1921–88) was a working-class Welsh writer, novelist, and Marxist critic, as well as an influential figure in the New Left and one of the founders of modern day cultural studies and cultural materialism. Williams long argued that literary texts do not simply reflect the happenings of society; instead, the texts actually can cause change as material parts of society. In this volume Williams’s theory is applied to a series of readings of texts produced in the years since his death, including works by A. S. Byatt, Salman Rushdie, and Kazuo Ishiguro, as the book explores the contributions of contemporary writers to the devolution and critique of the unitary British state.
