[csaa-forum] TENSES OF IMAGINATION: RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON SCIENCE FICTION, UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

[Andrew Milner]

New from Peter Lang

TENSES OF IMAGINATION:
RAYMOND WILLIAMS ON SCIENCE FICTION,  UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA

edited by Andrew Milner

Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien,
2010. X, 243 pp.
Ralahine Utopian Studies. Vol. 7
Edited by Raffaella Baccolini, Joachim Fischer, Tom Moylan and Michael
J. Griffin
ISBN 978-3-03911-826-7 pb.
sFr. 52.– / €* 35.60 / €** 36.60 / € 33.30 / £ 30.– / US-$ 51.95

Raymond Williams was an enormously influential figure in late
twentieth-century intellectual life as a novelist, playwright and
critic, 'the British Sartre', as The Times put it. He was a central 
inspiration for
the early British New Left and a close intellectual supporter of Plaid
Cymru. He is widely acknowledged as one of the 'founding fathers' of
cultural studies, who established 'cultural materialism' as a new
paradigm for work in both literary and cultural studies. There is a
substantial secondary literature on Williams, which treats his life and work
in each of these respects. But none of it makes much of his enduring
contribution to utopian studies and science fiction studies. This volume
brings together a complete collection of Williams’s critical essays on
science fiction and futurology, utopia, and dystopia, in literature, film,
television, and politics, and with extracts from his two future novels,
The Volunteers (1978) and The Fight for Manod (1979). Both the
collection as a whole and the individual readings are accompanied by
introductory essays written by Andrew Milner.

Contents: Space Anthropology, Utopia, and Putropia. Left Culturalism:
Science Fiction (1956) - William Morris (1958) - George Orwell
(1958) - The Future Story as Social Formula Novel (1961) - Terror (1971)
– Texts in their Contexts. Cultural Materialism: Nineteen Eighty-
Four (1971) - The City and the Future (1973) - On Orwell: An Interview
(1977) - On Morris: An Interview (1977) – Learning from Le Guin.
(Anti-) Postmodernism: Utopia and Science Fiction (1978) - The Tenses of
Imagination (1978) - Beyond Actually Existing Socialism (1980)
- Resources for a Journey of Hope (1983) - Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984
(1984) – The Future Novels: From The Volunteers (1978) - From The
Fight for Manod (1979).

'With the twenty-first-century reader very much in mind, Andrew Milner’s
selection of texts offers a new, "alternative" Raymond
Williams – the critic and occasional author of science fiction, the
futurologist, the wary, self-questioning utopian thinker for whom
intellectual pessimism is a lazy response and never the last word.'
- Professor Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading

'The future was the ultimate stake in all Raymond Williams’s thinking
and writing, as Andrew Milner simply and powerfully shows us
now, by assembling a volume of writings on science fiction and
utopianism that turns out to be a very substantial, wide-ranging reader
in Williams’s work as a whole. The defining importance of "the sense of
the future", as he called it, the future as the essential discipline of
political and moral imagination, is the lesson of this very welcome
collection.'
- Professor Francis Mulhern, Middlesex University

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