Tenses of Imagination

The Editor: Andrew Milner is Professor and Deputy Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. His previous publications include Postmodern Conditions (1990), Cultural Materialism (1993), Class (1999), Re-Imagining Cultural Studies (2002), Contemporary Cultural Theory (2002), Literature, Culture and Society (2005), Imagining the Future (2006) and Demanding the Impossible (2008).

«With the twenty-first-century reader very much in mind, Andrew Milner’s selection of texts offers a new, ‘alternative’ Raymond Williams – the critic and occasional author of science fiction, the futurologist, the wary, self-questioning utopian thinker for whom intellectual pessimism is a lazy response and never the last word.» (Professor Patrick Parrinder, University of Reading)«The future was the ultimate stake in all Raymond Williams’s thinking and writing, as Andrew Milner simply and powerfully shows us now, by assembling a volume of writings on science fiction and utopianism that turns out to be a very substantial, wide-ranging reader in Williams’s work as a whole. The defining importance of ‘the sense of the future’, as he called it, the future as the essential discipline of political and moral imagination, is the lesson of this very welcome collection.» (Professor Francis Mulhern, Middlesex University)«Milner’s timely collection demonstrates the relevance of Williams’ work as a theorist of the subjunctive at a moment when, as Slavoj Žižek claimed recently, the ‘only true question’ is whether global capitalism contains ‘antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction’.» (Ben Harker, New Formations)

• Contents: Space Anthropology, Utopia, and Putropia. Left Culturalism: Science Fiction (1956) - William Morris (1958) - George Orwell (1958) - The Future Story as Social Formula Novel (1961) - Terror (1971) – Texts in their Contexts. Cultural Materialism: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1971) - The City and the Future (1973) - On Orwell: An Interview (1977) - On Morris: An Interview (1977) – Learning from Le Guin. (Anti-) Postmodernism: Utopia and Science Fiction (1978) - The Tenses of Imagination (1978) - Beyond Actually Existing Socialism (1980) - Resources for a Journey of Hope (1983) - Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (1984) – The Future Novels: From The Volunteers (1978) - From The Fight for Manod (1979).