"Marxism and Literature, one of Raymond Williams' truly pathbreaking books, has survived its historical moment and continues to exert a fascinating force. Typically idiosyncratic in form - a series of brief illuminating vignettes of some vital topics in materialist criticism - it is equally challenging and original in its content. Williams was at once close to Marxism, and a robustly independent critic who made his own unique intellectual voyage. It is this combination of political sympathy with a powerfully distancing perspective which allows this deeply felt study at once to comment on its subject, and effectively to reinvent it." - Terry Eagleton