Includes bibliographical references and index.

Herbert Read: Freud, art, and industry -- The future of Marxism -- The meanings of work -- Marxist cultural theory -- Popular culture: history and theory -- British working-class literature after 1945 -- Pierre Bourdieu and the sociology of culture (with Nicholas Garnham) -- Popular forms of writing -- The future of socialism -- When was modernism?

Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of culture and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer. Published to coincide with the centenary of his birth and showing the full range of his work, from his early writings on the novel and society, to later work on ecosocialism and the politics of modernism, Politics and Culture shows Williams at both his most accessible and his most penetrating. An essential book for all those interested in the politics of culture in the twentieth century, and the development of Williams's work.