Raymond Williams

Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism

Key Words is committed to developing the tradition of cultural materialism derived from the founding analysis of culture and society in the work of Raymond Williams.

The journal provides a forum for radical thought on history and politics, and explores the role of literary, media and cultural forms in the contemporary global era. Each issue addresses a selected theme of relevance to the arts, media, politics and everyday life.

Further details can be found on the Raymond Williams Society website.

Issue 8, Labouring-Class Writing, has just been published and is available to buy now from Spokesman Books (£15).

CONTENTS:

Editors’ Preface

Guest Editors’ Introduction: Retrieval and Beyond: Labouring-Class Writing

Tim Burke and John Goodridge

Brute Strength: Labouring-Class Studies and Animal Studies

Donna Landry

Close Reading Yearsley

David Fairer

Not So Lowly Bards: Working-Class Women Poets and Middle-Class Expectations

Florence Boos

Genre Matters: Attending to Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poetry

William J. Christmas

Ecocriticism

Anne Milne

The Rise of Robert Bloomfield

Scott McEathron

The Foresters: Alexander Wilson’s Transatlantic Labouring-Class Nature Poetry

Bridget Keegan

‘Tracing the Ramifications of the Democratic Principle’:

Literary Criticism and Theory in the Chartist Circular

Mike Sanders

Labour History by Other Means

Jonathan Rose

Graphic Bric-a-brac: Comic Visual Culture and the

Study of Early Victorian Lower-Class Urban Culture (with illustrations)

Brian Maidment

* * *

Language and Locale: John Locke, Somerset and Plain Style

Olivia Smith

Institutional Culture as Whiteness: ‘a complex argument’

John Higgins

Reviews

Raymond Williams Foundation

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Back issues are also available from Spokesman Books.

Comments

Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain

Tate Liverpool: Exhibition 28 February – 11 May 2014 Adult £8.80 (without donation £8) Concession £6.60 (without donation £6) Help Tate by including the voluntary donation to enable Gift Aid Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain , is a new take on how the changes in the meaning of words reflect the cultural shifts in our society. This dynamic exhibition takes its name and focus from the seminal 1976 Raymond Williams book on the vocabulary of culture and society. An academic and critic influenced by the New Left, Williams defined ‘Keywords’ as terms that repeatedly crop up in our discussion of culture and society. His book contains more than 130 short essays on words such as ‘violence’, ‘country’, ‘criticism’, ‘media’, ‘popular’ and ‘exploitation’ providing an account of the word’s current use, its origin and the range of meanings attached to it. Williams expressed the wish some other ‘form of presentation could be devised’ for his book, and this exhibition i

'Not as dumb as he looks' - Muhammad Ali on Bertrand Russell

In his autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story , Muhammad Ali recounts how Bertrand Russell got in contact with him, and their ensuing correspondence: *** For days I was talking to people from a whole new world. People who were not even interested in sports, especially prizefighting. One in particular I will never forget: a remarkable man, seventy years older than me but with a fresh outlook which seemed fairer than that of any white man I had ever met in America. My brother Rahaman had handed me the phone, saying, ‘Operator says a Mr. Bertrand Russell is calling Mr. Muhammad Ali.’ I took it and heard the crisp accent of an Englishman: ‘Is this Muhammad Ali?’ When I said it was, he asked if I had been quoted correctly. I acknowledged that I had been, but wondered out loud, ‘Why does everyone want to know what I think about Viet Nam? I’m no politician, no leader. I’m just an athlete.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘this is a war more barbaric than others, and because a mystique is built up

James Kirkup

James Kirkup has died, aged 91. In 2004 he sent us a copy of No More Hiroshimas . He had originally collected together this volume of hia A-bomb poems in 1983, but it took twenty years before we published it 'as a real book'. James recounts 'My A-Bomb Biography' in his preface. Here are the opening lines of the title poem, No Mor e Hiroshimas . At the station exit, my bundle in hand, Early the winter afternoon's wet snow Falls thinly round me, out of a crudded sun. I had forgotten to remember where I was. Looking about, I see it might be anywhere - A station, a town like any other in Japan, Ramshackle, muddy, noisy, drab; a cheerfully Shallow impermanence: peeling concrete, litter, 'Atomic Lotion, for hair fall-out', a flimsy department store; Racks and towers of neon, flashy over tiled and tilted waves Of little roofs, shacks cascading lemons and persimmons, Oranges and dark-red apples, shanties awash with rainbows Of squid and octopus, shellfish, slabs o

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