Raymond Williams and Structures of Feeling

What “structures of feeling” surround Raymond Williams’s own work today, more than seventy years after the inception of his most famous concept? In this remarkable collection of essays, Louise Braddock and Niall Gildea gather together scholars and writers from a broad range of disciplines to consider the past, present and future of Williams’s work. From the death of George Floyd in the USA to student protests in South Africa, this book testifies to the enduring power of Williams’s ideas to illuminate a new epoch of dark times. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary cultural and literary criticism. -- Professor Arthur Bradley, Lancaster University
ate in his long career, Raymond Williams came to a reckoning with what he called a disabling “element of passivity” in the kind of reading he had learned to practice from his teacher, I. A. Richards. He had grown wary of immersive critical engagements that hewed too closely to mere exegesis of the text in question. The essays in this bracing new collection approach Williams’s most important critical concept as though responding to the call implicit in own late caveat against immersive reading. Actively and aggressively, they both analyse the notion of the “structure of feeling”, sometimes skeptically, and apply it to problems unanticipated by Williams, across a wide range of disciplinary contexts beyond criticism itself – from history, philosophy and gender studies to psychoanalysis, anthropology and criminology. -- Professor James Chandler, University of Chicago
At the end of his Saffron Walden exile, Raymond Williams was still writing feverishly about his beloved homeland in the Black Mountains border country. Hardly surprising, then, that “structures of feeling” became his deeply personal signature concept. There was a demand for it on the humanities Left, where it became foundational to cultural studies and influential in many other fields. Unlike Thompson’s “moral economy” or Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony”. . . for plodding rationalists “structures of feeling” was always an incoherent oxymoron. But, as this volume splendidly demonstrates, therein lies its enduring appeal. -- Professor Chris Hann, Emeritus Director, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling” has been more often invoked than defined. This collection responds to that difficulty head on, testing the critical concept across a range of theoretical contexts. Rather than tidying the term, the essays treat it as a way of thinking about experience in motion, and the concept emerges not as a handy tool but as a means of noticing how social life feels while it is still taking shape, and how those inchoate pressures later harden into forms we mistake for inevitabilities. It is a lucid and deeply compelling account of one of the defining concepts of our time. -- Dr Sowon S. Park, University of California, Santa Barbara
This book’s excellent cornucopia of papers highlights the bearing of “structures of feeling” on social change, psychoanalysis, anthropology, affect theory, criminalisation, political protest in South Africa, social policy in Britain, visual art and poetry. -- Professor Janet Sayers, University of Kent