Key Words A Journal of Cultural Materialism 10 (2012) edited by Catherine Clay Simon Dentith Kristin Ewins Ben Harker Angela Kershaw Stan Smith Vicki Whittaker Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism Editors: Catherine Clay (Nottingham Trent University), Simon Dentith (University of Reading), Kristin Ewins (University of Salford), Ben Harker (University of Salford), Angela Kershaw (University of Birmingham), Stan Smith (Nottingham Trent University), Vicki Whittaker. Guest Editor for this issue: Elizabeth Allen (Regent’s College, London). Editorial Advisory Board: John Brannigan (University College Dublin), Peter Brooker (University of Sussex), Terry Eagleton (National University of Ireland Galway and Lancaster University), John Higgins (University of Cape Town), Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University, New York), Peter Marks (University of Sydney), Sean Matthews (University of Nottingham), Jim McGuigan (Loughborough University), Andrew Milner (Monash University), Meaghan Morris (Lingnan University), Morag Shiach (Queen Mary, University of London), Dai Smith (Swansea University), Nick Stevenson (University of Nottingham), John Storey (University of Sunderland), Will Straw (McGill University), Jenny Bourne Taylor (University of Sussex), John Tomlinson (Nottingham Trent University), Jeff Wallace (University of Glamorgan), Imelda Whelehan (De Montfort University). Contributions for prospective inclusion in Key Words should comply with the style notes printed on pp. 201–203 of this issue, and should be sent to Catherine Clay, School of Arts and Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK ([email protected]). Books and other items for review should be sent to Angela Kershaw, Department of French Studies, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK. The reviews Editor, Stan Smith, can be contacted at [email protected]. Key Words is a publication of The Raymond Williams Society (website: www.raymondwilliams.co.uk). Contributions copyright © The Raymond Williams Society 2012. All rights reserved. Cover design by Andrew Dawson. Printed by Russell Press, Nottingham. Distributed by Spokesman Books, Nottingham. ISSN 1369-9725 ISBN 978-0-9531503-8-0 Contents Editors’ Preface 5 Guest Editor’s Preface 8 Elizabeth Allen Rereading The Long Revolution: Permanent Education versus the Exclusionary Consensus 11 John Higgins Raymond Williams in the Sixties: History, Communication and Conflict 28 Roberto del Valle Raymond Williams on Culture and Society 40 Jim McGuigan The Traitor in the House 55 Elizabeth Allen The British Reception of Early Soviet Fiction 1917–1934 68 Ian Gasse ‘Why, Comrade?’: Raymond Williams, Orwell and Structure of Feeling in Boys’ Story Papers 88 Simon Machin ‘The Army of the Unemployed’: Walter Greenwood’s Wartime Novel and the Reconstruction of Britain 103 Chris Hopkins Will Self and the Academics: Or, How to Write Satire 125 Alan Munton *** Contents Recoveries 141 Keywords 159 Review Article 170 Jennifer Birkett Reviews 178 Notes on Contributors 197 Raymond Williams Foundation (RWF) 200 Style Notes for Contributors 201 4 Editors’ Preface The current edition of Key Words marks the fiftieth anniversary of Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution with a number of essays which specifically reflect upon that text and the nature of its continuing relevance. The book itself has recently been reissued by the Welsh publisher Parthian, and is reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Williams himself could be severe on the practice of attaching significance to arbitrary dates, so our justification in marking this anniversary must rest elsewhere, on the privileged position of hindsight afforded by the transformations in culture and society since the early 1960s when Williams published The Long Revolution. Indeed, its later companion text, Towards 2000, invites just such a retrospective, insofar as it sought to analyse the competing possibilities for social change which presented themselves in the early 1980s, the period when the radical reinstatement of unmediated capitalist social relations that we now know as neo-liberalism was being initiated. John Higgins argues forcefully that one central strand of argument in The Long Revolution concerns the aims and purposes of education; in a wide-ranging account of some of the recent literature on higher education in particular, he detects an ‘exclusionary consensus’ in which other versions of education than those designed to serve the needs of a capitalist economy have been systematically ignored. For Roberto del Valle, by contrast, the distinctiveness of Williams’s text lies in the political argument that it makes, which is at once a social and cultural argument also: Williams avoids the deformations of his contemporary political moment by emphasising the ‘charged affective dimensions of communicable relationships’. In the third of these essays specifically directed at The Long Revolution, Jim McGuigan insists on the importance of Williams’s book to cultural studies – widely acknowledged – but also to the sociology of culture. Williams’s intellectual legacy has been carried forward in predominantly literary contexts; we need also to acknowledge and develop the continuing relevance and challenge of cultural materialism in other domains, especially in relation to naive ideas of technological determinism. Elizabeth Allen’s article on the persistent trope of treachery in Williams’s novels continues the journal’s critical discussion of Williams’s fiction, especially in the light of the controversy over the value of the novels which aired in Key Words 6 and 9. The article also reminds us of the social and cultural ground out of which The Long Revolution, and its companion texts Culture and Society and Towards 2000, grew. Three other articles in this issue discuss various forms of twentieth-century working-class and socialist fiction, and suggest some of the actual contexts for Williams’s commitment to a sophisticated realism, to which his work on the history of the novel as a form was always contributory. Key Words 10 (2012), pp. 6–7 Editors’ Preface Ian Gasse, in a fascinating survey of Soviet fiction published in English in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrates the remarkable interest in, and widespread dissemination of, novels about the new society that was being created in the Soviet Union in those years. Simon Machin explores Orwell’s discussion of boys’ fiction, suggesting a model here for Williams’s own extension of cultural analysis beyond the tight confines of high culture. Given Williams’s own later ambivalence towards Orwell this is a bold suggestion; yet it does point to the actual congruence of their writing in some respects, indicated also by Williams soliciting a contribution from Orwell for the short-lived journal Politics and Letters in the late 1940s. Chris Hopkins, in a model analysis of Walter Greenwood’s career after Love on the Dole, concentrates especially on the complex cultural moment of the Second World War, when contradictory pressures within the Ministry of Information could permit a progressive and social-democratic meaning to become attached to the war effort, despite Churchill’s own unwillingness to broaden the war aims beyond the sheer matter of survival. The final article in this section of this issue, by Alan Munton, focuses on the contemporary fiction of Will Self, which he views as primarily satirical, and which challenges some of the tidy categories of the academy – including, perhaps, the arguments for a complex realism made by Williams himself in The Long Revolution. Chris Hopkins, in his article on Walter Greenwood, discusses especially a now little-read novel, Something in my Heart, and this connects to a new feature in the journal, entitled ‘Recoveries’. In this section we include accounts by Joseph Pridmore and Elinor Taylor of several ‘working-class’ oriented novels from the 1920s and 1930s. There is a large potential field of discussion here, and we hope that this section will continue to provide lively contributions to the journal. Finally, following the new ‘Recoveries’ feature, in this issue we revive an early practice of Key Words, to which the journal’s very title refers: the discussion of the social semantics of contemporary key words which Williams initiated with his own book of that title in 1976, and which has been continued in Tony Bennett’s, Lawrence Grossberg’s and Meaghan Morris’s New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society from 2005. We hope that readers of Key Words will wish to contribute to this ongoing project. The reviews section includes a review article by Jennifer Birkett on recent books by Jonathan Bate and Thomas Docherty, which discuss the salience of Higher Education in the current political conjuncture; Birkett suggests the continuing relevance of Williams’s discussion of these matters even in the changed circumstances of today. There have been some changes to the Editorial Board of Key Words which should be acknowledged; following the injunction to ‘welcome the coming, 6 Editors’ Preface speed the parting guest’, we welcome Liz Allen as guest editor for this issue, and wish Dave Laing well after his departure from it. A successful year for the Raymond Williams Society should also be noted. Peter Brooker has stepped down as Chair of the Society, though he remains on the advisory board; we thank him for his long and successful service as Chair. We are very happy to welcome Derek Tatton as his replacement. The Society has been active during the year in