Introduction

Abstract

The tributes following the death of Raymond Williams in January 1988 made large claims for his standing and significance. Francis Mulhern described him as ‘the outstanding intellectual in British culture this century’, while Stuart Hall argued that his work represented ‘the most sustained engagement with the central domains of English cultural life’.¹ Terry Eagleton wrote of his transformation of socialist cultural studies from ‘the relative crudity of 1930s Marxism to an impressively rich, subtle and powerful body of theory’, a point echoed by Mary Joannou, who further argued that this body of work ‘has no equivalent in English this century’.²