http://strongreading.blogspot.com/2011/08/raymond-williams-marxism-and-literature.html

Chapter 4: “Ideology”

Ideology for Williams is an inherently problematic concept, which he thinks requires radical revision. He outlines three meanings the concept has had in Marxist theory:

• (i) a system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group;
• (ii) a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness – which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge;
• (iii) the general process of the production of meanings and ideas.

In one variant of Marxism, senses (i) and (ii) can be effectively combined. (55)

Part 3: “Literary Theory”

Chapter 1: “The Multiplicity of Writing”

this identification of art with “imaginative” skill involves a reduction of art to a series of forms labeled the proper objects of aesthetic experience. In literature this has resulted in the reduction of “literature” to specialized forms that obscure the multiplicity in types of writing practices: literature is “fictional” and not “factual,” it is “imaginative” and not “practical,” and it is not “subjective” rather than “objective.” Literature’s association with these concepts is specific to the capitalist era, and a Marxist literary theory must attempt to recapture the multiplicity of forms of writing outside of the categories left to it by bourgeois critics.