Writing Wales in English
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R. S. Thomas to Rowan Williams
The Spiritual Imagination in Modern Welsh Poetry
by M. Wynn Thomas
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
The great religious poetry of R. S. Thomas and the poetry of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams is rooted in a remarkable late-twentieth-century tradition of spiritual poetry in Wales that includes figures as different as Saunders Lewis and Vernon Watkins, Waldo Williams and Bobi Jones. Examining this body of work in detail, the present study demonstrates how the different theological outlooks of the poets was reflected in their choice of form, style and vocabulary, highlighting a literary culture that was highly unusual in its rejection of a prevailing secularisation in the UK, Western Europe and the USA.
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Pacifism, Peace and Modern Welsh Writing
by Linden Peach
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This book introduces the contribution of modern Welsh literature to our understanding of peace and pacifism—an important and much overlooked subject in Welsh studies. Taking a literary-historical approach to the subject, it reveals how modern Welsh writing opens up history in ways in which historical discourse alone sometimes fails to do. It argues that the concepts of peace, peacefulness and pacifism have played a broader and more complex role in Welsh life than has been recognised, primarily through an influential Welsh-language pacifist intelligentsia. The author reminds us that Welsh pacifism is distinguished from English pacifism by the Welsh language itself, its links with Welsh nationalism and by the fact that it faced challenges and pressures never encountered by English pacifism. Authors discussed in this study include Tony Curtis, George M. Ll. Davies, Pennar Davies, John Eilian, Emyr Humphreys, Glyn Jones, D. Gwenallt Jones, T. Gwynn Jones, T. E. Nicholas, Iorwerth C. Peate, Angharad Price, Ned Thomas, Lily Tobas and Waldo Williams.
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The Nations of Wales
1890-1914
by M. Wynn Thomas
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Certain simple and stereotypical images of Wales strike an immediate chord with the public, both in Wales itself and beyond its borders. For much of the twentieth century, the country was thought of as 'The Valleys', a land of miners and choirs and rugby clubs. This image of a 'Proletarian Wales' (with its attendant Socialist politics) dominated popular imagination, just as the image of 'Nonconformist Wales'—a Wales of chapels and of a grimly puritan society—had gripped the imagination of the High Victorian era. But what of the Wales of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades? What image of Wales prevailed at that time of revolutionary social, economic, cultural, religious and political change? This book argues that several competing images of Welshness were put in circulation during that time and proceeds to examine several of the most influential of these as they took the form of literary texts.
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Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women's Fiction
Gender, Desire and Power
by Linden Peach
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Presents a comparative study of fiction by late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. This work is of interest to students interested in women's studies, gender studies, and cultural studies as well as Welsh, Irish and Celtic studies.
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The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys
Contemporary Critical Perspectives
by Linden Peach
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
For over half a century, Emyr Humphreys's work as a novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist and television producer has been extraordinarily impressive. This pioneering and stimulating book considers Humphreys's fiction from a range of contemporary critical perspectives and stresses its relevance to the 21st century. Drawing on the work of leading modern cultural and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha, psychoanalytic critics such as Melanie Klein and Jacqueline Rose, and gender theorists such as Judith Butler, Linden Peach brings fresh perspectives to the content, structure and developing nature of Humphreys's work, employing, for example, historicist, post-historicist, new geography, psychoanalytic and feminist and postfeminist frameworks. Through detailed readings which highlight subjects such as gender identity, contested masculinities, war, pacifism, strangeness and 'otherness', problematic father and daughter relationships, and cultural discourse in complex linguistic environments, Peach suggests that Humphreys's work is best understood as 'dramatic', 'dissident' and/or 'dilemma' fiction rather than by the term 'Protestant novelist' which Humphreys used to describe himself at the outset of his career. Stressing how Humphreys came to see himself as more of a 'protesting' novelist, Peach examines how the dilemmas around which his fiction is based, originally linked to Humphreys's definition of himself as a 'protestant' writer, increasingly become sites in which controversial, and often dark themes, are explored. This approach to Humphreys's work is pursued through exciting readings of some of Humphreys best and lesser-known works.
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After Raymond Williams
Cultural Materialism and the Break-up of Britain
by Hywel Dix
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This volume is not only a detailed look at some of the writing produced in Scotland and Wales in the years surrounding political devolution, it also include a look at the ways in which difference sub-cultural commuities use fiction to renegotiate their relationships with the British whole.
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Edward Thomas
The Origins of His Poetry
by Judy Kendall
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
“Edward Thomas: The Origins of his Poetry” builds a new theoretical framework for critical work on imaginative composition through an investigation of Edward Thomas's composing processes, on material from his letters, his poems and his prose books. It looks at his relation to the land and landscape and includes detailed and illuminating new readings of his poems. It traces connections between Thomas's approach to composition and the writing and thought of Freud, Woolf and William James, and the influence of Japanese aesthetics, and draws surprising and far-reaching conclusions for the study of poetic composition.
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Eutopia
Studies in Cultural Euro-Welshness, 18501980
by M. Wynn Thomas
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
The Brexit debates confirmed how Wales's relationship to Europe has for too long been discussed exclusively, narrowly and suffocatingly in terms of its social, political and economic aspects. As a contrast, this volume sets out to explore the rich, inventive and exhilarating spectrum of pro-European sentiment evident from 1848 to 1980 in the writings of Welsh intellectuals and creative writers. It ranges from the era of O. M. Edwards, through the interwar period when both right wing (Saunders Lewis) and left wing (Cyril Cule) ideologies clashed, to the post-war age when major writers such as Emyr Humphreys and Raymond Williams became influential. This study clearly demonstrates that far from being insular and parochial, Welsh culture has long been hospitably internationalist. As the very title Eutopia concedes, there have of course been frequently utopian aspects to Wales's dreams of Europe. However, while some may choose to dismiss them as examples of mere wishful thinking, others may fruitfully appreciate their aspirational and inspirational aspects.
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Black Skin, Blue Books
African Americans and Wales, 1845-1945
by Daniel G. Williams
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Williams analyses and compares the ways in which African Americans and the Welsh have defined themselves as minorities within larger nation states (the UK and US). The study is grounded in examples of actual friendships and cultural exchanges between African Americans and the Welsh, such as Paul Robeson's connections with the socialists of the Welsh mining communities, and novelist Ralph Ellison's stories about his experiences as a GI stationed in wartime Swansea. This wide-ranging book draws on literary, historical, visual and musical sources to open up new avenues of research in Welsh and African American studies.
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Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry
by Matthew Jarvis
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
“Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry” examines the question of how recent English-language poetry from Wales has responded to the diverse physical environments of Wales. The first volume to offer a sustained assessment of Welsh poetry in English within the context of recent developments in environmental literary criticism, this book also draws on aspects of human geography to explore the rich contemporary poetics of Welsh space and place. Opening with an examination of poets from the 1960s as well as the early work of R.S. Thomas, “Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry” subsequently concentrates on the poetry of writers who have come to prominence since the 1970s: Gillian Clarke, Ruth Bidgood, Robert Minhinnick, Mike Jenkins, Christine Evans, and Ian Davidson.
Close reading of key texts reveals the way in which these writers variously create Welsh places, landscapes, and environments—fashioning rural and urban spaces into poetic geographies that are both abundantly physical and inescapably cultural. Far from reducing Wales to mere scenery, the poetry that emerges from this book engages with the environments of Wales, not just for their own sake, but as a crucial way of exploring key issues in Welsh culture—from the negotiation of female identity in a land of masculine myths to the exploration of Welsh space in a global context.
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Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture
by Linden Peach
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This pioneering study introduces readers to key themes from animal studies, as a frame within which it examines the representation of animals and animality in the work of a range of authors. In this new approach to animal studies, the concept of a relational universe that has emerged in recent natural and physical science is argued as being central. With fresh readings of Welsh literary and non-literary publications, including the Welsh press and Welsh-language manuals, the book explores relationships among animals and between humans and animals, to approach subjects such as intelligence, sensibility and knowledge from an animal perspective. The possibility of redrawing and reclaiming a history of rural and industrial Wales is suggested according to an animal history and agenda. This innovative contribution to Welsh and animal studies illuminates fascinating and controversial subjects, including animal domestication, captivity, communication, biopsychology, human exceptionalism, zoos and farming.
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Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies
Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature
by Andrew Webb
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
“Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies” offers a revelatory re-reading of Edward Thomas. Adapting Pascale Casanova's vision of 'world literature' as a system of competing national traditions, this study analyses Thomas's appropriation of Anglocentric British literary culture at key moments of historical crisis in the twentieth century: after the First World War, either side of the Second World War, and with the resumption of war in Ireland in the 1970s. It shows how the dominant assumptions underpinning the discipline of English Literature marginalise the Welshness of Thomas's work, before combining this revised 'world literature' model with fresh archival research to reveal how Thomas's reading of Welsh culture—its barddas, folk and literary traditions—is central both to his creation of an innovative body of poetry and to his extensive, and relatively neglected, prose. This study is groundbreaking in its contribution to recent debates about devolution and independence for Britain's constituent nations.
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Embodying Identity
Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature
by Harri Roberts
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Since the time of Freud, some of the most radical innovators within critical theory have stressed the importance of the body and its representation to the constitution of subjectivity. This book explores some of the theoretical debates surrounding the body, and assesses its value as a critical concept, through an analysis of the body's representation both in Welsh literary texts in English, and discourse about Wales more generally.
Combining psychoanalytic with more culturally orientated approaches to the body, the book offers an historically informed account of the body that analyses its role in the construction and contestation of identity at a cultural as well as individual level, contributing in a new and radical way to the rapidly expanding critical literature concerned with exploring the construction of identity in a Welsh cultural context.
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John Ormond's Organic Mosaic
Poetry, Documentary, Nation
by Kieron Smith
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
In a uniquely dualistic creative career spanning five decades, John Ormond made major contributions to both English-language poetry and documentary filmmaking. Born in Swansea, he learned to 'think in terms of pictures' while working as a journalist in London, where he secured a job at the celebrated photojournalist magazine Picture Post. Employed later by the BBC in Cardiff during the early days of television, Ormond went on to become a pioneer in documentary film. This book is the first in-depth examination of the fascinating correspondences between Ormond's twin creative channels; viewing his work against the backdrop of a changing Wales, it constitutes an important case study in the history of documentary filmmaking, in the history of British television, and in the cultural history of Wales.
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Compatriots or Competitors?
Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish Writing and Brexit in Comparative Contexts
by Hywel Dix
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This is the first comparative study of the distinctive literatures and cultures that have developed in Wales, Scotland, England and Northern Ireland since political devolution in the late 1990s, especially surrounding Brexit. The book argues that in conceptualising their cultures as 'national', each nation is caught up in a creative tension between emulating forms of cultural production found in the others to assert common aspirations and downplaying those connections in order to forge a sense of cultural distinctiveness. The author explores the resulting dilemmas, with chapters analysing the growth of the creative industries; the relationship between UK City of Culture and its forerunner, the European Capital of Culture; national book prizes in Britain and Europe; British variations on Nordic Noir TV; and the Brexit novel. With regard to separate cultural precursors and responses in each nation, Brexit itself is debated as a factor that has widened their differences, placing the future of the UK in question.
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J.O. Francis, Realist Drama and Ethics
Culture, Place and Nation
by Alyce von Rothkirch
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This book rediscovers and re-evaluates the work of the Welsh dramatist J. O. Francis (1882—1954) and his contribution to the development of Welsh drama in the twentieth century. More than a prize-winning dramatist, whose plays were performed all over the world, Francis can also be described as one of the founding fathers of modern Welsh drama, whose work has helped establish theatrical realism on the Welsh stage. His creative non-fiction for the popular press and for radio gives a unique perspective on how Wales was seen through the eyes of a perceptive London-Welsh observer. Using much previously unpublished material, this volume is an excellent introduction to one of Wales's foremost dramatists and is innovative in the way that it creates a picture of the amateur dramatic scene of south Wales (1920—40) based on sound statistical analysis of available evidence. It situates Francis's work in its cultural context and brings this exciting period in Welsh cultural history to life in its introduction to a new audience.
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Wales Unchained
Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century
by Daniel Williams
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
In “Wales Unchained” Daniel G. Williams explores how Welsh writers, politicians and intellectuals have defined themselves—and have been defined by others—since the early twentieth century. Whether by exploring ideas of race in the 1930s or reflecting on the metaphoric uses of boxing, asking what it means to inhabit the 'American century' or probing the linguistic bases of cultural identity, Williams writes with a rare blend of theoretical sophistication and accessible clarity. This book discusses Rhys Davies in relation to D. H. Lawrence, explores the simultaneous impact that Dylan Thomas and saxophonist Charlie Parker had on the Beat Generation in 1950s America, and juxtaposes the uses made of class and ethnicity in the thought of Aneurin Bevan and Paul Robeson. Transatlantic in scope and comparative in method, this book will engage readers interested in literature, politics, history and contemporary cultural debate.
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Fight and Flight
Essays on Ron Berry
by Various Authors
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Ron Berry is one of the most brilliant and cantankerous of Welsh writers. Radical and earthy, he was a collier, carpenter, navvy, footballer, and unorthodox environmentalist. This volume, the first collection of essays on Berry, is a timely response to his forthcoming centenary.
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Cartographies of Culture
New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English
by Damian Walford Davies
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
“Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English” offers a pioneering new examination of the links between maps and imaginative writing. Concerned to draw literary studies and geography into a fruitful dialogue, the book offers a genuinely interdisciplinary study of literary texts in relation to the spatialities of culture. Taking the anglophone literature of Wales as its main 'data field', the book offers a boldly imaginative and stringently theorised analysis of five literary 'maps'. What emerges is nothing less than a new way of reading literature through, and as, maps.
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Eighteenth Century Writing From Wales
Bards and Britons
by Sarah Prescott
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Examines Welsh writing in English in the context of critical debates concerning the rise of cultural nationalism and the 'invention' of Great Britain as a nation in the eighteenth century. This study investigates the ways in which Anglophone literature from and about Wales imagines the nation and its culture in a range of genres.
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Modernism From the Margins
The 1930's Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas
by Chris Wigginton
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Modernism from the Margins is an accessible and challenging account of the 1930s writing of two of the most popular authors of the time. Locating the work of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas historically, the book questions standard accounts of the period as Auden-dominated and offers an inclusive and theoretical account of the engagement of both writers with the varieties of Modernism. It is the first reading at length of either MacNeice's or Thomas's work in the light of literary theory, and one of only a handful of texts to look at the writing of the 1930s in these terms.
This book is an important contribution to contemporary discussions of both of these writers, and of the general issues of modernism, postmodernism, literary identity, and cultural identity it raises.
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R. S. Thomas
A Stylistic Biography
by Daniel Westover
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
R. S. Thomas (1913-2000) is the most recognizable literary figure in twentieth-century Wales. His controversial politics and public personality made him a cultural icon during his life, and the merits of his poetry have continued to be debated in the years after his death. Yet these debates have too-often circled familiar ground, returning to the assumed personality of the poet or to the received narrative of his experience. Even the best studies have focused almost exclusively on ideas and themes. As a result, the poetry itself has frequently been marginalized. This book argues that Thomas's reputation must be grounded in poetry, not personality. Unlike traditional literary biography, which combines historical facts with the conventions of narrative in an attempt to understand the life of a literary figure, this stylistic biography focuses on the essential relationship between the maker and the made object, giving priority to the latter. R. S. Thomas began his career by writing sugary, derivative lyrics inspired by Palgrave's Golden Treasury, yet he ended it as a form-seeking experimentalist. This study guides the reader through that journey, tracing Thomas's stylistic evolution over six decades. In so doing, it asserts a priority: not to look at poetry, as many have, as a way of affirming existing notions about an iconic R. S. Thomas, but to come to terms with the tensions within him as they reveal themselves in the tensions—rhythmic, linguistic, structural—of the poetry itself.
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Whose People?
Wales, Israel, Palestine
by Jasmine Donahaye
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Wales has a centuries-long history of interest in Palestine and Israel, and a particularly close interest in Jews and Zionism, which has been expressed widely in the literature. “Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine” is the first monograph to explore this subject. It asks difficult and probing questions about the relationship that Wales has had with Palestine in the past, and now has with the Israel-Palestine situation in the present, and it challenges received wisdom about Welsh tolerance and liberalism. Using publications in Welsh and in English across several centuries, this survey examines Welsh missionary efforts and colonial desires in Palestine; complex and contradictory attitudes to Jews, and the use of Zionism and the Hebrew language revival as a model for Wales. Beginning with an analysis of a so-called tradition of Welsh identification with Jews, the study locates its origins in the early twentieth century and moves on to uncover provocative material in Welsh conversionist writing on Jews, Muslims and Samaritans in Palestine in the nineteenth century, and imaging of Jews in twentieth-century fiction and the periodical press. It concludes with a survey of Jewish literary responses to Wales that suggests that some Jewish writers have been active agents in reinforcing Welsh support of Zionism in particular. The evidence uncovered here shows a complex picture of a unique cultural and political relationship. “Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine” makes an important contribution to international Jewish studies, to the study of British colonial involvement in Palestine, and to Welsh and Jewish literary and cultural history.
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Saturday's Silence
R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading
by Richard McLauchlan
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
R. S. Thomas is recognised globally as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Such detailed attention as has been paid to the religious dimensions of his work has, however, largely limited itself to such matters as his obsession with the 'absent God', his appalled fascination with the mixed cruelty and wonder of a divinely created world, his interest in the worldview of the 'new physics', and his increasingly heterodox stance on spiritual matters. What has been largely neglected is his central indebtedness to key features of the 'classic' Christian tradition. This book concentrates on one powerful and compelling example of this, reading Thomas's great body of religious work in the light of the three days that form the centre of the Gospel narrative; the days which tell of the death, entombment and resurrection of Christ.
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Liberating Dylan Thomas
Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude
by Rhian Barfoot
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Throughout the history of Thomas's critical reception, psychoanalytic interpretations have been applied that have privileged the psychosexual over the psycho-linguistic elements of his work. The wealth of sexual and pseudo-sexual imagery has acquired a negative charge and has been used to evidence claims that Thomas was the epiphon of his own disturbed psyche, thus reducing the poetry to the expression of the poet's schizoid neuroses. Avoiding the biography-based approaches that have dominated hitherto, Liberating Dylan Thomas rescues his early poetry from the position of servitude to the discursive mastery of psychoanalysis. Placing the poetry and psychoanalysis together in a mutually illuminating dialogue, this book clearly demonstrates the ways in which the vital connection between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and Thomas's early poetry can be articulated without reductive simplification.
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Postcolonialism Revisited
Writing Wales in English
by Kirsti Bohata
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
“Postcolonialism Revisited” is a groundbreaking book, the first to explore and analyse Anglophone Welsh writing, both literary and otherwise, in the context of contemporary thinking about colonial and post-colonial cultures. Kirsti Bohata considers how far the paradigms of postcolonial theory may be usefully adopted and adapted to provide an illuminating exploration of Welsh writing in English, while simultaneously considering the challenges that such writing might offer to the field of postcolonial theory.
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Locating Lynette Roberts
Always Observant and Slightly Obscure'
by Various Authors
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing—for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between the colours, mythologies and landscapes of the two countries and, in so doing, poses a series of important questions: where, and what, is home? How do we inhabit a particular time and place? This volume of essays brings together for the first time some of the most important research on Roberts's work that has emerged since the landmark republication of her Collected Poems in 2005. Written by a range of prominent scholars, writers and poets, each essay strives in some way to 'place' Roberts, analysing the environments to which her writing responds and teasing out the interwoven skeins of her national, cultural and political affiliations. Together, they pinpoint key concerns in Roberts's elusive, haunting work, and define her original contribution to twentieth-century literary culture.
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Emyr Humphreys
A Postcolonial Novelist?
by Diane Green
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
This book is an examination of the novels of Emyr Humphreys in the light of his ideas on Wales: Welsh history, Welsh culture and the importance of a separate Welsh identity. It explores Humphreys' practice in the light both of his own theories of culture and fiction and of a variety of models derived from postcolonial theory. Its main conclusions are that there are two particular techniques, the use of Welsh history and of Celtic myth, that have proved particularly central to Humphreys' purposes throughout his career. These have consistently been the principal ways in which he foregrounds for the reader both what it means to be Welsh and the importance, for the nation, of maintaining an understanding of its heritage. And both these key strategies of his fiction should, it is argued, be read as typical postcolonial devices.
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New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas
A writer of words, and nothing else?
by Various Authors
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Dylan Thomas's reputation precedes him. In keeping with his claim that he held 'a beast, an angel, and a madman in him', interpretations of his work have ranged from solemn adoration to exaggerated mythologising. His many voices continue to reverberate across culture and the arts: from poetry and letters, to popular music and Hollywood film. However, this wide and sometimes controversial renown has occasionally hindered serious analysis of his writing. Counterbalancing the often-misleading popular reputation, this book showcases eight new critical perspectives on Thomas's work. It is the first to provide in one volume a critical overview of the multifaceted range of his output, from the poetry, prose and correspondence to his work for wartime propaganda filmmaking, his late play for voices Under Milk Wood, and his reputation in letters and wider society. The whole proves that Thomas was much more than, to use his own dubious self-description, 'a writer of words, and nothing else'.
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In the Shadow of the Pulpit
Literature and Nonconformist Wales
by M. Wynn Thomas
Part of the Writing Wales in English series
Writer versus preacher: this book shows how this struggle has lain at the heart of Welsh writing and culture for the past two hundred years, intimately shaping the English language literature produced by Wales. Starting with a simple explanation of the history and character of Welsh Nonconformity, it traces the growing textual response to Nonconformity's hegemonic cultural power from the eighteenth century onwards, culminating in twentieth-century writers' attempts to undermine it by wresting words from the control of the pulpit. It also uncovers a whole new body of nineteenth-century fiction from Wales, and re-defines Dylan Thomas's debt to his Nonconformist ancestors.
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