Raymond Williams and Cartoons: From Churchill's Cigar to Cultural History

Abstract

The article uses elements of Raymond Williams’s theoretical framework to analyse Polish cartoons from the Stalinist period. The purpose of the analysis is to offer an account of the cultural history of the period, centred on the cartoons. The author first reviews relevant theoretical elements from Williams’s framework, including the concepts of the structure of feeling and of the dominant and alternative social characters, and then applies them to an actual analysis. In order to account better for the regularities observed in the cartoons, the author proposes modifying Williams’s framework with the addition of the concept of a prescriptive social character. As Williams’s approach stresses the study of a general organization in specific works or institutions that belong to a certain cultural whole, it seems that the cartoons, when analysed within this framework, offer a good access point to the culture of the period. It may be assumed that cartoons from other periods can also be insightfully analysed with the use of the presented approach.