Raymond Williams (1921-88) was a Welsh, working-class academic writer and novelist, influential in both the creation of cultural studies as an academic subject and in his attempts to democratize access to education. Here Hywel Dix applies Williams’s theory—that literary texts not only reflect what is happening in a society but also cause certain changes to occur—to literature and film produced in the years since Williams’s death, particularly during the years of political devolution in the United Kingdom. Dix explores the ways in which contemporary Welsh and Scottish writing contributes to devolution and how these writers carry out an imaginative critique of the unitary British state.