Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (1977)

This article focuses on two of the most enduring terms in Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature: “dominant, residual, emergent” and “structures of feeling.” Williams’s theory of history as mixtures and layers of different temporal moments is not only alive and well in the field today; it also offers a way to theorize what it means to be “Undead,” that is, to produce thoughts that live after or out of one’s time. And yet, Williams’s stress on process over structure is so open and flexible that it allows one to avoid some hard questions about how history really works.