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This volume ranges from the Second World War to the postmodern, considering issues of the 'popular' and the competing criteria by which literature has been judged in the later twentieth century. As well as tracing the transition from modernism to postmodernism, the authors guide students through debates around the pleasures of the popular and the question of inter-relations between 'mass' and 'high' cultures. Drawing further upon issues of value and function raised in Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900-1960, they examine contemporary literary prizes and the activity of judgement involved in English Studies. This text can be used alongside the other books in the series for a complete course on twentieth-century literature, or on its own as essential reading for students of mid to late twentieth-century writing. Texts examined in detail include: du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise, Barker's The Ghost Road.
A sister volume to She is Fierce this is a stunning gift book featuring 130 poems written by women. With poems from classic, well loved poets as well as innovative and bold modern voices, She Will Soar is a stunning collection and an essential addition to any bookshelf. From the ancient world right up to the present day, it includes poems on wanderlust, travel, daydreams, flights of fancy, escaping into books, tranquillity, courage, hope and resilience. From frustrated housewives to passionate activists, from servants and suffragettes to some of today’s most gifted writers, here is a bold choir of voices demanding independence and celebrating their hard-won power. Immerse yourself in poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Christina Rossetti, Stevie Smith, Sarah Crossan, Emily Dickinson, Salena Godden, Mary Jean Chan, Charly Cox, Nikita Gill, Fiona Benson, Hollie McNish and Grace Nichols to name but a few
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.
A collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most popular yet critically neglected authors, this book explores the full range of Thomas's work. It uses approaches - such as marxism, feminism and deconstruction - previously neglected by critics and focuses on his complex relationships with surrealism, modernism, Wales, popular culture, the USA and his own contemporaries. In doing so, it restores Thomas to his rightful place as a major twentieth century literary figure and cultural icon.
Shakespeare and Wales offers a 'Welsh correction' to a long-standing deficiency. It explores the place of Wales in Shakespeare's drama and in Shakespeare criticism, covering ground from the absorption of Wales into the Tudor state in 1536 to Shakespeare on the Welsh stage in the twenty-first century. Shakespeare's major Welsh characters, Fluellen and Glendower, feature prominently, but the Welsh dimension of the histories as a whole, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Cymbeline also come in for examination. The volume also explores the place of Welsh-identified contemporaries of Shakespeare such as Thomas Churchyard and John Dee, and English writers with pronounced Welsh interests such as Spens...
The first cultural history of English Welsh duality - an identification with two constituent nations at once - that explores how 'Welshness' was imagined, performed, and mobilised in England during and between the two world wars.
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.
When the Welsh writer Kate Roberts died in 1985 at the age of 94, the Times obituary noted that 'she was felt by many to rank with Maupassant as one of the leading European short story writers'. Roberts is widely acknowledged as the major twentieth-century novelist and short story writer to have written in the Welsh language, being known and revered in Wales as 'the Queen of our Literature'. Much of her work has been translated into English and other languages and yet she remains today relatively little known and under-appreciated in comparison, for example, with other female contemporaries who wrote in English, such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, and Elizabeth Bowen. This volume seeks to redress the balance, bringing the life and work of this extraordinary novelist, playwright, short story writer, journalist, and ardent political campaigner to the attention of the wider world audience that the sheer quality of her writing deserves.
From the mid-eighteenth century to the twentieth, tourism became established as a leisure industry and travel writing as a popular genre. In this collection of essays, leading international historians and travel writing experts examine the role of home tourism in the UK and Ireland in the development of national identities and commercial culture.