Remembering Raymond Williams: His Theoretical Heritage to China’s World Literature and Culture Studies

Abstract

Raymond Williams, the eminent British Marxist literary theorist, was introduced to China in the late 1980s, and his theories have since been increasingly attractive to China’s literary and cultural studies. He not only touched upon some of the fundamental issues of Marxist literary theory, such as ideology, culture, hegemony and aesthetics, but also developed it with his dynamic construction of a sort of cultural materialism, thus bridging between Marxist socio-historical and aesthetic criticism and cultural and linguistic factors. While literary and cultural theory is in decline in the West, Williams’s legacy is still appreciated in international circles, which ought to be cherished and inherited by us Chinese scholars in our studies of world literature and culture.