His new collection is focused on specific texts and authors. exploring the historical and cultural sources of their particular patterns of writing. Williams studies dramatic form and language in Racine and Shakespeare; the politics of fiction in the English Jacobin novel and the literature written in the 'springtime of peoples' in 1848; David Hume and Charles Dickens, and the changing characteristics on region and class in the English novel and on Robert Tressell.

Raymond Williams is the most productive and influential socialist writer in England today.His work over the past thirty years has spanned cultural criticism, literary studies, communication, and politics. He was frequently united these diverse fields in works that demonstrate an unrivalled maturity and independece of thought. For many years Raymond Williams was Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge.