In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

MARTIN RYLE Raymond Williams: Materialism and Ecocriticism Raymond Williams was born in 1921 and died in 1988. Many would regard him as the single-most important critic of literature and culture at work in postwar Britain. He was a major figure on the British intellectual left: ‘‘by far the most commanding figure,’’ in Terry Eagleton’s assessment.∞ Working initially in university adult education, at the age of forty he was appointed a Lecturer, and subsequently became Professor of Drama, at Cambridge. He made the ancient university a new base for his continued extramural commitments : to the critical public discussion of ideas, to the political Left, to his native Wales and its historical and renascent cultures. He was the author or coauthor of some thirty books, which include plays and novels as well as major works of criticism, and he wrote scores of articles, chapters, pamphlets , and reviews (his complete publications are listed in the invaluable forty-seven-page bibliography in Alan O’Connor’s Raymond Williams: Writing , Culture, Politics). His writing was translated during his lifetime into several European languages and into Japanese, and was published and reviewed extensively in North America from the early 1960s onward, though he visited the United States and Canada only once, in the spring of 1973. Williams’s work as a whole drew continually on his socialist convictions and his working-class background. His late political writings also engaged with the destructive impact of industrialized societies on the natural environment ; the editors of the papers from a 1997 symposium on his intellectual legacy argue that ‘‘it is possible to locate as far back as the late 1950s an intrinsic commitment to the principles of ecological critique.’’≤ This commitment made Williams unusual among British literary academics (very few of whom have shared it until quite recently), and it set him apart from the main currents of Laborism, social democracy, and Marxism. His scholarly and critical work on culture and the natural environment included reviews, talks, and essays. His deepening engagement with the theme can be traced ∂∂ martin ryle in O’Connor’s bibliography, where one notes, for example, that he wrote an article entitled ‘‘Ideas of Nature’’ in the Times Literary Supplement in late 1970, gave a lecture with the same title at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts the following year, and in 1972 contributed the chapter ‘‘Ideas of Nature’’ to J. Benthall’s collection Ecology: The Shaping Inquiry. This dimension of his thinking came to the fore in a major work of his maturity, The Country and the City, which is among the earliest British books that might be described—albeit contentiously—as a work of ecocriticism: it deals at length, and centrally, with representations of the rural world, and although it expresses an orthodox socialist suspicion of ruralist cultural politics, it is also skeptical about metropolitan ideas of ‘‘progress.’’ Greg Garrard, a leading contemporary British ecocritic, notes that the book ‘‘profoundly influenced both Marxist readings of pastoral and the ecocritical responses that arrived later to qualify or contradict them.’’≥ Williams’s distinctive contribution to ecocritical thinking is not a matter of a discrete paradigm, elaborated in theoretical mode. Rather, we can learn from his practice of politically engaged criticism, attentive to environment and ecology and committed to reading cultural works in social and historical contexts. Here, I consider The Country and the City after reviewing his directly political interventions of the early 1980s, made in the context of the self-reappraisal of the British Left that followed Margaret Thatcher’s decisive Conservative election victory of 1979.∂ Williams published essays, mostly based on earlier journal articles, in four contributed volumes on the future of the Left and on antinuclear politics. A speech he gave in London to the Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA), then quite recently founded, was published by SERA as a pamphlet, Socialism and Ecology, in 1982. Other occasional writings included reviews of Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative in Eastern Europe and Socialism and Survival, which were key books in the development of red/green thinking in Europe; and of Alva Myrdal’s The Dynamics of European Nuclear Disarmament.∑ Taken together, these interventions over a five-year period reflect Williams’s conviction that the crisis demanded a fundamental rethinking of the socialist idea, in which the question of ecological limits—‘‘the newly realized and decisive fact: that we cannot materially go on in the old ways’’—would have to be made central.∏ Ecological and antimilitarist perspectives, linked to...

Share