Landscape and Historical Memory in Raymond Williams's People of the Black Mountains

• Simon Dentith ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Reading

     University of Reading

     Reino Unido

     
• Localización: Literature and history, ISSN 0306-1973, Vol. 24, Nº 2, 2015, págs. 73-88
• Idioma: inglés
• Enlaces
  • Texto completo
• Resumen

  • The article addresses Raymond Williams's late novel People of the Black Mountains (1989–90), using Pierre Nora's seminal concept of lieux de mémoire both to explicate Williams's writing and as a contrast with it. Starting from Williams's intimate relationship with the landscape of the Black Mountains, the article demonstrates how he provides a secular and demystificatory account of history, in which actual historical determinants can, in a non-metaphorical sense, be seen. The novel is also a final restatement of an opposition that is to be found throughout Williams's career, between writing that is immersed in the immediacy of experience and that which takes in the wider viewpoint. The article concludes by suggesting that Williams can be understood as recasting Nora's opposition between ‘memory’ and ‘history’ as the terms of a cultural and political dialectic, in addition to providing the theoretical basis for locating acts of remembrance.