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Raymond Williams and European Marxism: Lukacs, Sartre, Gramsci / Daniel, R. Gerke
Swansea University Author: Daniel, R. Gerke
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DOI (Published version): 10.23889/Suthesis.46244
Abstract
The Western Marxist tradition from Lukacs to Colletti is usually considered a continental European one, with no major British representative. This thesis presents the Welsh cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams (1921-1988) as a critical Anglophone participant in that tradition. The developme...
| Published: |
2018
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa46244 |
| Abstract: |
The Western Marxist tradition from Lukacs to Colletti is usually considered a continental European one, with no major British representative. This thesis presents the Welsh cultural critic and novelist Raymond Williams (1921-1988) as a critical Anglophone participant in that tradition. The development of Williams’s cultural materialism, far from being the product of a rigid ‘British’ empiricism, was centrally influenced by the ideas of Western Marxist thinkers. At the core of this influence, and of the ‘European’ rationalist element in Williams’s work, is the concept of ‘totality’, an abiding concern with which Williams shares with the Western Marxists. The three European Marxists to whom Williams’s intellectual development is most indebted are those whom he described, in 1972, as ‘Marxism’s alternative tradition’: Georg Lukacs (1885-1971), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). The work of these thinkers, as it slowly appears in English, confirms Williams’s insistence on ‘total’ analysis and permits him to generate a Marxism capable of reconciling subjective experience with the complex materiality of social relations. I read the theoretical apparatus which results from these transnational interactions as a literary and a philosophical realism committed both to the aesthetic representation of the social totality and to the interaction of experience with objective reality. The form of political praxis engendered by these European influences is a ‘revolutionary culturalism’ in which the working-class attains hegemony by realising its experience and interests in a concrete culture. |
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| Item Description: |
A selection of third party content is redacted or is partially redacted from this thesis. |
| Keywords: |
English Literature, Philosophy, Critical and Cultural Theory, Politics, Marxism, British New Left, Western Marxism, European Theatre, Existentialism, Continental Philosophy, Realism, Modernism, Transnationalism, Raymond Williams, Georg Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Antonio Gramsci |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |