Thus the terms “structure” and “feeling” seem incompatible; the former implies stability, the latter elusiveness. This becomes even more confusing given the fact - as I will show soon - that Williams defined its usefulness for analysis in different ways, altering its emphasis and meanings, from the time he proposed an initial theorization of the concept in Preface to Film to the most thorough definition he gave it in the chapter “Structures of Feeling” in Marxism and Literature.‘O To understand Williams’s use of the term we need to explore the nature of the problems he was trying to resolve by its introduction in Preface to Film. Williams wanted to make a link between dramatic conventions and written notations in drama. He argued that there is a relation between the conventions of a period; thus, his approach was to identify an experience common to a group of writers in a particular period. As he explained, In the study of a period, we may be able to reconstruct, with more or less accuracy, the material life, the social organization, and, to a large extent, the dominant ideas ....[ Blut it is a common experience, in analysis, to realize that when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart (PF, 21-22). This residual element is the “structure of feeling,” the total or common experience of a period, and has no “external counterpart” either at the level of sociological or textual analysis. As Williams explained to his interviewers in the New Left Review in 1979, ”the key to this notion, both to all it can do and to all the difficulties it still leaves, is that it was developed as an analytic procedure for actual written works, with a very strong stress on their forms and conventions.”” In Preface to Film, the notion of “structure of feeling’’ was used in the sense of a general or shared culture and was not given any extensive theoretical articulation. The phrase “structure of feeling” occurs somewhat casually in Williams’s classic book, Culture and Society. He uses the term on three separate occasions with hfferent meanings each time: First, as an endorsement of something that is “apprehended directly,’’ along with the assumption that it is a gift to perform this apprehension; second, as an attribute of the novels of the 1840s; and third, as the equivalent of a negative definition of ideology (false consciousness).’2 Again, there is no theoretical articulation of the term, although Williams begins to suggest two ideas that are developed more deeply in The Long Revolution: first, that a structure of feeling is neither universal nor class-specific, and second, that it is not formally learned. In The Long Revolution, Williams offers his first theoretical account of the structure of feeling:13