Modernism under Review: Raymond Williams's The Politics of Modernism

Abstract

Raymond Williams’s The Politics of Modernism was one of three posthumous publications, all of which appeared in 1989 the year after his death. The others were Resources of Hope and the first volume, followed by a second in 1990, of the projected trilogy People of the Black Mountains. Their range across literary and cultural theory and analysis, political commentary and polemic, autobiography and fiction, was a mark of Williams’s truly remarkable and distinctive achievement. They were all also in different ways both retrospective and prospective works. Resources of Hope collected essays from 1958–87, its title echoing the final section of Towards 2000 (1983), a work which, as it looked forward, itself revisited and revised the concept of the ‘long revolution’. People of the Black Mountains had been in Williams’s mind, and perhaps already begun, at the time of the Politics and Letters interviews in 1979. Williams responded to the very end, this is to say, to the challenges of a common and changing history across the interlocking domains of critical and cultural inquiry. In so doing, he followed a personal and, in some ways, generational narrative which worked through his relations to the Communist and Labour Parties, the New Left, Marxism, and cultural and literary theory, as well as to questions of regional and national identity. In all this, he habitually revisited his own ongoing project and this was especially relevant, as it turned out, to his position on modernism. The Politics of Modernism was particularly intriguing and welcome, however, because, at first sight, it offered to intervene directly where Williams had apparently had no decisive agenda. He had eschewed the roll-call of modernist poets, already made standard