On Raymond Williams’ Spatial Criticism Of Literary

In the literary criticism and cultural study, Raymond Williams attaches great importance to space, which echoes the “spatial turn” in western countries after the 20 th century, emphasizing the social and cultural factors in space. Raymond Williams’ researches on literary space criticism are to conduct the study taking literary space as part of culture and society. He is not a researcher on the history of villages or cities, but the one who involves the space into his study on textual criticism and cultural materialism, not only providing an interdisciplinary horizon but only possessing a certain research value.Williams’ practices of spatial criticism in literature are mainly reflected in his book The Country and the City and the main dimension that Williams carries out his literary space criticism is countries, cities and the borders between countries and cities. From a linear perspective of time, Williams has analyzed the presentation of country space in British literature and in his analyses, the development and changes of space are embodied from the hymns under the ideology of feudal aristocracy during capitalism in its embryo to the compromised descriptions on the theological mansions reflecting the contradiction and conflict between new and old orders and then to novels on country residences based on capitalism under the prevailing capitalism. Williams criticizes progressive myth of the city, emphasizes the complexity and heterogeneity of city itself and reflects the duplicity of darkness and brightness of the city as well as the fights and contests among various powers in city space. Border space is not only a kind of geological space but also a kind of border space of culture. It holds such cultural factors as nationality, identity and language, and thus it is also a kind of space interwoven by custom and culture.Raymond Williams holds a dual identity of literary critic and cultural theorist. Therefore, when making literary space criticism, he adopts a unique method featured by his double identities, mainly presented in three aspects as structure analysis, historical analysis and cultural analysis. Affected by British Cambridge tradition and structuralism, Raymond Williams emphasizes the integral analysis on structure, which however breaks the factors of form and combines history to make spatial analysis. Moreover, he redefines the culture and destroys the limitation of elite traditions. Researches on the containment of life styles in hidden space and the fighting process of culture in cultural space have been made by Williams as well, which shows the inclusiveness and criticalness of Williams’ theory and is of great theoretical significance.By combining spatial criticism and cultural study closely, Williams connects the spatial criticism with cultural study closely. Therefore, his literary criticism has great enlightenment and significance. In addition, his spatial criticism manifests the critical standpoint of Marxism. He believes that space is the intersection of fights between nations, nationalities, classes, politics, cultures and ideologies in modern society and emphasizes the close connection of literary space and social reality, based on which critical reflections on capitalism is made. By analyzing and criticizing the spaces in British literature, Williams evaluates the politics and culture in reality, and explores the difficulties and problems existed in real living space. And finally he has visions of a living space that is different from the space of capitalism and an ideal living space for individual, and longs for rebuilding a “recognizable community” where individuals and the society can be in harmonious relationship.