We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
THE CONCEPT OF “EXPERIENCE” AND THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS, 1924–1963.
- Authors
MIDDLETON, STUART
- Abstract
Despite intense scholarly interest in the “Anglo-Marxism” that rose to prominence in Britain from the mid-1950s, its intellectual lineaments and lineages have yet to be fully accounted for. This is particularly the case with the concept of “experience,” which was a central category in the work of two of the most influential figures of the early “New Left” in Britain: Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. This essay traces a conceptual history of “experience” from its emergence in Cambridge literary criticism during the 1920s and 1930s, and in the quasi-Marxist literary culture of the 1930s, to the confluence of these two currents in the work of Williams and Thompson. Reassessing the nature of each thinker's engagement with Leavisite literary and cultural criticism, and of Thompson's attempted reformulation of Marxism, it argues that recovering their widely differing usages of “experience” illuminates their distinctive conceptions of “culture” as a site of political action.
- Subjects
RIGHT &; left (Political science) -- History; THOMPSON, E. P. (Edward Palmer), 1924-1993; WILLIAMS, Raymond, 1921-1988; LITERARY criticism; MARXIST philosophy; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Modern Intellectual History, 2016, Vol 13, Issue 1, p179
- ISSN
1479-2443
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1017/S1479244314000596