In all his cultural work, Williams was writing against two traditions: 'one which has totally spiritiualized cultural production, the other which has relegated it to secondary status' (Politics and Letters 352-3). At his death, both opposing traditions had been much weakened. Willimas was committed to the view that the prevailing 'categories of literature and criticism were so deeply compromised that they had to be challenged in toto' (Politics and Letters 326).

His most important legacy is the interdisciplinary field of cultural studies which he pioneered and consolidated. As part of his contribution, he articulated and refined such key concepts as, structure of feeling, knowable community, hegemony, and cultural materialism.

Along with New Left Review and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, for both of which he served as a kind of spiritual father at one time or another over two decades, Williams actively built bridges to such converging currents of cultural studies as the Frankfurt School, the neo-Gramscians, and other renewals of Western cultural Marxism, as well as French and East European historical semiology, Foucauldian genealogy, and the Mac-Luhan inspired Canadian discourse on communication technology.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, in Culture and Society, The Long Revolution and Communications, Wiliams established the frameworks for placing literary debates in larger contexts. Williams argued for the democratization of culture through the reform of cultural institutions.

In the later 1960s and early 1970s, encouraged by a newly politicized generation, Williams produced revaluations of fictions, drama and television: Modern Tragedy, Drama form Ibsen to Brecht, The Country and the City and Televison.

In Marxism and Literature, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, Williams elaborated his mature theory of cultural materialism, thematizing culture as a productive process and a constitutive signifying system whose institutions and practices are delimitable from the anthropological sense of culture as a whole way of life.

(Extracted from Irena R, Makaryk (ed.), Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, Buffalo, London, 1993.)