RAYMOND WILLIAMS AND THE ENGLISH NOVEL 57 Williams's overall position can then be categorized as 'socialist-humanist*. An illustration of Williams's critical practice featuring specific texts cannot be undertaken here. However, Williams's enterprise can be broadly termed 'realist-centric*. As we have seen, his concepts, especially the tripartite distinction of the residual-dominant-emergent, are particularly, tielpful in unravelling the complex structure of feeling of a specific period in a particular text. Williams's recent position not only incorporates a consideration of the historical and material conditions of cultural production but also the social and historical conditions of the reader's response. This then affirms the thesis that textual interpretation is historically and culturally variable and critical practice is a dialectical process that is in a continuous state of dynamic flux. This premise has far-reaching implications for the development of theories dealing with gender and race relations, areas that have, until recently, been consigned to marginality, dispossession and subordination. NOTES AND REFERENCES 1. Criticism and Ideology, Verso, London, 1976, p. 24. 2. Quoted in Carry Watson, 'Criticism and/the English Idiom: The Significance of Raymond Williams', New Universities Quarterly, Vol. 31, No.4, Autumn 1977, p. 468. 3. Marxism and Literature, University Press, Oxford, 1977, p. 145. 4. The Long Revolution, Chatto and Windus, London, 1961, p. 41. 5. During the 50s and 60s, Williams remains in close association with the New Left (in fact, he can be seen as a key figure in its formation, along with Stuart Hall and E.P. Thompson) while keeping a distance from Marxism, certain aspects of which, like the base/superstructure model, he could not accept. It is only in 1973, with the publication of The Country and the City, that his acceptance of Marxism becomes evident and is finally consolidated with Marxism and Literature (1977). 6. Williams, 'Culture and Revolution: A Response' in Terry Eaglefcon and Brain Wicker (eds.). From Culture to Resolution, Sheed and Ward, London, 1968, p. 308. 7. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, J. Dover Wilson (ed.). University Press, 1963, p. 6. 8. Lea vis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment, Chatto and Windus, London, 1960, pp. 1-2. 9. F.R. Leavis, Education and the University, Chatto and Windus, London, 1965, p. 143. 10. The Long Revolution, p. 49. 11. Problems in Materialism and Culture,Verso, London, 1980, p. 39. 12. Criticism and Ideology, p. 36. 13. Politics and Letters , Verso, London, 1981, p. 245. 14. See 'Crisis in English Studies', Writing in Society, Verso, London, 1983, p. 203. 15. The Great Tradition, Penguin, Hammondsworth, 1962, p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 39. 17. Politics and Letters, p. 247. 18. Jacob Korg, Rev.TEN, Modem Fiction Studies, 18, p. 263. 19. C. McCabe, James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, Macmillan, London, 1981. 20. Marxism and Literature, p. 44. 21. Politics and Letters, p. 159. 22. The Long Revolution, p. 48. 23. Ibid., p. 48. 24. SeeThe Long Revolution, p. 65; Politics and Letters, p. 157.