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Rhys Davies
Rhys Davies (1901-78) was a highly prolific writer and one of the first novelists to depict industrial Wales, making his sixty-year career a seminal influence of Welsh literary culture. Davies was a complicated figure himself: a gay man who grew up as a shopkeeper's son in the Rhondda, he ultimately left Wales to write about his homeland in England. This volume unravels his national experience and its deep ties to complex issues of class, sexuality, and gender, as it follows a career considered to be that of "the representative Welshman."
Queer Wales
The relationship between nation and queer sexuality has long been a fraught one, for the sustaining myths of the former are often at odds with the needs of the latter. This collection of essays introduces readers to important historical and cultural figures and moments in queer life, and it addresses some of the urgent questions of queer belonging that face Wales today.
The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop
Concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, this collection considers how eight shops created during the modernist era exceeded their commercial functions to open the spaces of literary production. Understanding these unique social spaces on the threshold of commerce and culture provides a basis for comprehending how the changes to the physical contexts of the twenty-first century reading experience have affected our relationship to books and reading.
Rhys Davies
Davies was the holder of a complex identity: he was a gay man who grew up as a shopkeeper's son in the Rhondda who left Wales to write about his homeland in England. This book unravels a national experience that is deeply bound up in complex negotiations of class, sexuality, and gender and follows a career that was predicted to be that of "the representative Welshman". The book is divided into three sections: the first begins with Davies’s childhood in Blaenclydach and the ways in which his memories of his childhood reinforce continuing themes in his stories and novels; the second will place Davies in literary London and address Davies’s struggle to enter the privileged circles of literary production, circulation, and reception; the final section considers the established Davies of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
Queer Square Mile, Queer Short Stories from Wales
This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation.
Sex, Sects and Society
In an extended account of national identity, this companion volume to People, Places and Passions provides the first detailed study of the sexual and spiritual life of Wales in the period 1870–1945. The author argues that whilst Wales and its people experienced a disenchantment of the spiritual world, a revolution in sexual life was taking place. This innovative study examines how advances in life expectancy and improvements in health were reflected in emotional life. In contrast to the traditional emphasis upon hardship and hardscrabble experiences, this fascinating and beautifully written volume shows that the Welsh were also a free and fun-loving people.
The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature
This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.
The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop
The trade in books has always been and remains an ambiguous commercial activity, associated as it is with literature and the exchange of ideas. This collection is concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, and it considers how eight shops founded during the modernist era provided distinctive spaces of literary production that exceeded and yet never escaped their commercial functions. As the contributors show, these booksellers were essential institutional players in literary networks. When the eight shops examined first opened their doors, their relevance to literary and commercial life was taken for granted. In our current context of box stores, online shopping, and ebooks, we no longer encounter the book as we did as recently as twenty years ago. By contributing to our understanding of bookshops as unique social spaces on the thresholds of commerce and culture, this volume helps to lay the groundwork for comprehending how our relationship to books and literature has been and will be affected by the physical changes to the reading experience taking place in the twenty-first century.
Rhys Davies: A Writer's Life
Rhys Davies (1901-78) was among the most dedicated, prolific and accomplished of Welsh prose writers. This is his first full biography, describing the early years of the Blaenclydach grocer's son, his abhorrence of 'chapel culture', his bohemian years in Fitzrovia, his visit to the Lawrences in the south of France, his unremitting work ethic, his patrons, his admiration for the French and Russian writers who were his models, his love-hate relationship with the Rhondda, and above all, the dissembling that went into Print of a Hare's Foot (1969), 'an autobiographical beginning', which proves to be a most unreliable book from start to finish.
Fight and Flight
Ron Berry (1920–97) is one of the most remarkably astute yet relatively neglected twentieth-century Rhondda writers. An avid walker, birdwatcher, ‘potcher’, sportsman and miner, Berry is the product of a distinctive Rhondda landscape; the formidable peaks of Pen Pych and Cefn Nant y Gwair were to be a continuing source of inspiration for him in his writing. His idiosyncratic viewpoints, of which there are many, are reflected in both his memoir and fiction. As the first sustained critical study of his work, this collection seeks a literal, physical and chronological ‘zooming-outwards’, from the man himself to the personal and literary geographies and communities in which he was posited, to his creative legacy.
