Raymond Williams

The book traces the word culture and four related terms — industry, democracy, class, and art — through English writing from the Industrial Revolution to the mid-twentieth century, arguing that their meanings changed together in response to the same upheaval. Williams reads Burke, Cobbett, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Ruskin, Morris, Eliot, and Leavis, showing how culture came to mean a whole way of life on one hand and a body of refined artistic achievement on the other, and how the second sense was repeatedly used against the first. Against the Leavisite position that culture is a minority possession under threat from mass society, he argues that there are no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses, and that culture is ordinary.

Williams's later method, cultural materialism, treats culture not as a reflection of an economic base but as itself a material productive process — a revision of the Marxist base–superstructure model set out in Marxism and Literature. His most useful analytic tool there is the distinction between dominant, residual, and emergent formations within any culture at a given moment, which allows a critic to describe change without assuming a single spirit of the age. Structures of feeling names the lived, still-forming quality of experience in a period, which is present in art before it has hardened into ideas. His Keywords traces contested terms historically, on the argument that vocabulary is where social conflict shows.