Second Generation
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Raymond Williams's Second Generation is a quietly powerful novel of class, identity, and the painful friction between where you come from and where you are going — set against the gritty industrial backdrop of Oxford and its surrounding working-class communities. The novel chronicles the Owen family: Harold, a factory worker rooted in the rhythms of manual labour and trade union solidarity, and his son Peter, a university student caught between two worlds — the academic intellectual sphere he inhabits and the working-class heritage he can neither fully embrace nor entirely leave behind. Williams constructs a portrait of mid-twentieth-century Britain in which the promise of social mobility carries a hidden cost: the slow erosion of belonging. Written by one of the foremost cultural theorists of the twentieth century, Second Generation is far more than a domestic drama — it is a rigorous, novelistic argument about the structures of class and culture that shape human consciousness. Williams, best known for landmark works of cultural criticism such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, brings the same analytical precision to his fiction, weaving sociological insight into the fabric of character and dialogue with remarkable subtlety. The result is a novel that unsettles easy assumptions about meritocracy and progress, leaving the reader to wonder whether the ladder of opportunity is ever truly free of the weight of what lies below.
Author: Raymond Williams
Format: Hardback
Published: 1964, Chatto and Windus
Genre: Modern fiction
Edition: 1st ed.,
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Markings: Previous owner
Raymond Williams's Second Generation is a quietly powerful novel of class, identity, and the painful friction between where you come from and where you are going — set against the gritty industrial backdrop of Oxford and its surrounding working-class communities. The novel chronicles the Owen family: Harold, a factory worker rooted in the rhythms of manual labour and trade union solidarity, and his son Peter, a university student caught between two worlds — the academic intellectual sphere he inhabits and the working-class heritage he can neither fully embrace nor entirely leave behind. Williams constructs a portrait of mid-twentieth-century Britain in which the promise of social mobility carries a hidden cost: the slow erosion of belonging. Written by one of the foremost cultural theorists of the twentieth century, Second Generation is far more than a domestic drama — it is a rigorous, novelistic argument about the structures of class and culture that shape human consciousness. Williams, best known for landmark works of cultural criticism such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution, brings the same analytical precision to his fiction, weaving sociological insight into the fabric of character and dialogue with remarkable subtlety. The result is a novel that unsettles easy assumptions about meritocracy and progress, leaving the reader to wonder whether the ladder of opportunity is ever truly free of the weight of what lies below.