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Raymond Williams

Raymond Williams Books

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Loyalties

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“If Gissing is less compassionately observant than Mrs Gaskell, less overtly polemical than Kingsley, still The Nether World and Demos would be sympathetically endorsed by either of them, or by their typical readers. Yet Gissing does introduce an important new element, and one that remains significant. He has often been called ‘the spokesman of despair,’ and this is true in both meanings of the phrase. Like Kingsley and Mrs Gaskell, he writes to describe the true conditions of the poor, and to protest against those brute forces of society which fill with wreck the abysses of the nether world. Yet he is also the spokesman of another kind of despair: the despair born of social and political disillusion. In this he is a figure exactly like Orwell in our own day, and for much the same reason. Whether one calls this honesty or not will depend on experience.”

PoliticsDespairDisillusionmentLiterary CriticismGeorge OrwellGeorge Gissing
Author:Raymond Williams
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“Country' and 'city' are very powerful words, and this is not surprising when we remember how much they seem to stand for in the experience of human communities. In English, 'country' is both a nation and a part of a 'land'; 'the country' can be the whole society or its rural area. In the long history of human settlements, this connection between the land from which directly or indirectly we all get our living and the achievements of human society has been deeply known.”

HumansLongHas BeensCountryWholeSeemsRememberNationsCommunityPowerfulCitiesKnownLandAchievementAreasConnectionsSurprisingVery PowerfulHuman SocietySettlementRural AreasPowerful Words
Book:The Country and the City
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“On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.”

WayIdeasCountryLightNaturalSimplePowerfulCitiesVirtueIgnoranceCommunicationAmbitionFundamentalsNoiseLimitationInnocenceAssociationContrastCentreHostileWorldliness
Book:The Country and the City
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