In Writing in Society, Raymond Williams brings together essays on literature, language, drama, class and cultural form, asking what writing actually does inside the social world rather than treating it as some sealed decorative cabinet for clever people.

He moves through prose, theatre, rhetoric, regional writing, English studies and the politics of readership, tracing how literary forms are shaped by institutions, labour, education, power and ordinary speech.

Williams writes always as someone patient, material and unfashionably forthright. Not theory as ornamental fog machine, but criticism as a way of asking how culture is made, who gets to speak through it, and what kinds of social life become visible or buried inside literary form. A strong shelf-fit for readers interested in cultural studies, Marxist criticism, English literature, drama, and the long argument over whether writing belongs to the university, the public, the market, or nobody in particular.

Verso paperback edition, printed by The Thetford Press, with light general shelf wear and handling to cover edges. Internally clean and solid; a good reading copy of a useful Williams collection.