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Raymond Williams ranks as one of the most influential post-World War II cultural theorists in the English-speaking world. A prolific writer, he made significant contributions to intellectual history, literary criticism, and historical linguistics. His work includes the critical and historical examination of the novel, the popular press, drama, television, and the cinema; he also wrote novels, short stories, and plays. But Williams is perhaps best remembered as one of the creators of cultural studies, a discipline that has profoundly reshaped scholarship in the humanities since the mid 1970s.
Williams developed his ideas in reaction to the theories that dominated literary discussions during his formative years at the University of Cambridge in the 1930s and 1940s. On the basis of his critiques of the elitist view of culture held by the Cambridge literary scholar F. R. Leavis and of the deterministic view of class consciousness promoted by Marxist dialectical materialism, he created a new theoretical space that he called "cultural materialism." Rejecting the distinction between high culture and popular culture in favor of a more inclusive view, he saw cultural representations, whether epic poetry or workers' cooperatives, as "ordinary"--not in the sense of being banal but as giving meaning to everyday life.
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