Raymond Williams and His Contrapuntal Reading of Literary Representations
He Weihua
1 School of Foreign Languages at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University (Hangzhou 310018, China) 2 School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (Shanghai 200240, China)
Abstract��
As two of the most fundamental spaces for inhabitation,"the country"and"the city",together with the life dramas with them as the background,are central themes of literary representation. Writers tend to celebrate the country because of its association with the peaceful pastoral life; on the other hand,the city,which stands for a secular and depraved way of life,becomes a sinister place in numerous literary works. People have taken these associations in literary representations for granted,forgetting that they are actually ideological constructions. In The Country and the City,Raymond Williams reads such spatial repre-sentations in literary works contrapuntally by restoring their historical situations and reveals that they are simply exquisite ways to screen cruel exploitation and repression in real life. Consequently these false representations of the country and the city as well as their relationships with each other tend to prevent the people from seeing the reality of exploitation and the miseries of people. According to him,capitalism is the real cause of the recent alienation between the country and the city. Based on Williams’conviction about the constructedness of the conventions of representing the country and the city in literary works,this paper undertakes to investigate Williams’methodology in revealing the ideological and political functions of these spatial representations.
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2012, Vol. 32 
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