The paper considers Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’ concept from the perspective of Williams’s developing opposition to literary structuralism, which he saw as a contributing factor to methodological paralysis in Higher Education in the 1980s. It looks at the influence on Williams of Lucien Goldmann’s ‘genetic structuralism’ and other currents in Marxian literary analysis as he sought a paradigm for ‘structure’ which accommodated meaningful human activity and political change. This paradigm has resonances and suggests parallels with psychoanalysis despite Williams’s declared lack of interest in psychoanalysis itself.

The paper is followed by short comments and discussion from four other contributors: Katie Fleming (Cambridge), Steven Groarke (Roehampton, British Psychoanalytical Society), Keir Martin (Oslo), and Michael Uebel, (Austin, Texas).