Raymond williams the country and the city pdf

British Burma in the New Century, — pp Cite as. Nothing embodied these changes as much as the development of Rangoon as a major imperial port city. Yet, this chapter will point to a different trend: namely, that despite the fact that the Burmaphiles, and those who looked askance at much that they found there, all assumed that this backwater province of the Indian empire benefitted from these realities, they were much more interested in the rural and natural aspects of Burma. At the same time, their narrative accounts often had the unintended effect of proclaiming the power of British rule over such a challenging and exotic land. In order to pursue these themes in greater depth, this chapter will focus upon some of the ways in which British authors regarded Rangoon and other cities. Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

A positive judgment needs to be communicated at the outset, since the disagreements and irritations which Raymond Williams's argument inevitably and properly provokes are always threatening to divert attention from the originality of his approach and the brilliance of so many of his individual insights. The scope of the book is enormous - no less than the cultural interrelations of country and city through four centuries of English experience as they are manifested in literature and social commentary, together with a continuing critique of the resultant myths, assumptions, and conventions. Yet this account conveys the wrong impression if it suggests a dryly academic study. The Country and the City is acutely personal in a double sense - first because it is thoroughly committed to a particular ideology, second because Williams does not Hinch from introducing his own early history and family recollections as elements in his argument. As a consequence, the opening chapter of his book, in which he tells of his personal transplanting from a working-class background in a remote Welsh village to a university city, and tries to assess its effect upon his approach and attitudes, is sincerely and deeply moving to an extent unprecedented in a" work of traditional scholarship. This makes critical reviewing an unusually delicate operation, since here, even more than in scholarly writing, contemporary fashion favours an objective, impersonal approach.

THE COUNTRY AND. THE CITY. Raymond Williams. Fellow of Jesus College. Cambridge. CHATTO & WINDUS. LONDON.
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