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Until very recently, Welsh literary Modernism has been critically neglected, both within and outside Wales. This is the first book devoted solely to the study of Welsh literary Modernism, revealing and examining eight key Anglophone Welsh writers. Laura Wainwright demonstrates how their linguistic experimentation constituted an engagement with the unprecedented linguistic, social and cultural changes that were the making of modern Wales, and formed the crucible for the emergence of a distinct Welsh Modernism. This study of Welsh Modernism challenges conventional literary histories and, in more than one sense, takes Modernism and Modernist studies into new territories.
This book analyses narratives that center on, construct, or comment on black British history. Outlining the emergence of black history in Britain and shifts in the politics of history, it principally focuses on recent narratives that engage critically with the historical culture surrounding black Britain.
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.
'Leeworthy set out to write a biography which fully reflects the complexity of Thomas' life, especially foregrounding 'the political character of Gwyn's character and creative output' but he does so much more, expanding the reader's knowledge by giving us not just the life but also the times... This punchy portrait of a real Welsh literary heavyweight hits home with the brutal realism of Thomas' jabbing prose and mordant wit.' – Jon Gower, Nation.Cymru 'Fury of Past Time is a model of its kind. An immense amount of research has gone into this biography, which will be the standard work on Gwyn Thomas for many years to come. It deserves to be read by those who already admire the fiction and ...
A critical study of the much-loved early twentieth century English poet Edward Thomas - the 'poet's poet'. It includes illuminating new readings of his poems, prose and letters. Topics covered include his close relation to nature, the land and landscape.
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, whi...
The book attempts, for the first time, to demonstrate a vital connection between Thomas’s poetry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This will benefit readers by helping shed new and illuminating light on the writing and will help close the gap that sadly still exists between Thomas’s critical and popular receptions. Close textual analysis of poems that have to date received only scant critical attention e.g. ‘Today this insect’ The Notebooks have received only scant critical attention, and have been subordinated to a purely minor role. Here, however the Notebooks are re-visited and re-evaluated, because the text of these four manuscript exercise books, provides us with a highly significant and revealing document.
Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. T...
This is a ground breaking comparative study of the fascinating connections between African Americans and the Welsh, beginning in the era of slavery and concluding with the experiences of African American GIs in wartime Wales.
The study places the work of a major religious poet of the late twentieth century in a number of striking new perspectives that allow him to be viewed for the first time as an 'alternative' war poet, a conscience-stricken pacifist, a jealously opportunistic student of art, and an experimental biographer of the modern soul. Published to mark the centenary of the ‘ogre of Wales’, this volume deals with the idées fixes that serially possessed the fiercely intense imagination of R. S. Thomas: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family and, of course, a vexingly elusive deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring Thomas’s poetry into startling new relief. The war poetry is considered alongside the poet’s early relationship to the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of the poetry’s concerns; the intriguing ‘secret code’ of some of Thomas’s Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are brought centre-stage from the peripheries to which they have been routinely relegated.