Raymond Williams, Romanticism and Nature

This article discusses the important British social, literary and cultural critic, Raymond Williams, in his relation to Romanticism, seen as a broad movement of protest expressed in many cultural fields against the conditions of life in capitalist modernity. After exploring the Romantic dimension of Williams’s major works, including Culture and Society [Williams, Raymond. 1958. Culture and Society, 1780–1950. New York: Harper & Row], The Country and the City [Williams, Raymond. 1973. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press] and several works of the 1980s, the article focuses on his trajectory from the ecological point of view, in terms of his attempts to deal with cultural attitudes towards Nature on the one hand and threats to the environment on the other.