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Postcolonialism Revisited is a ground-breaking 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. In addition to dealing with a range of theorists in the field, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Charlotte Williams and Homi Bhabha, the book looks at how Wales has been constructed as...
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 world-view 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.
This book is a timely Welsh antidote to Brexit. It is packed with original materials but is written in a highly accessible style by an author who recently won a Welsh Book of the Year award. It throws a wholly new light on Wales, revealing a country that has long been internationalist in cultural outlook, well prepared to look in directions other than that of England.
This is the first book about Welsh periodicals in English to show how they have helped the development of Welsh writers and have provoked debate about key cultural and political issues in Wales.
“Nearly every major figure of his era,” writes his biographer Adrian Frazier, “worked with Moore, tangled with Moore, took his impression from, or left it on, George Moore.” The Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore (1852–1933) espoused multiple identities. An agent provocateur whether as an art critic, novelist, short fiction writer or memoirist, always probing and provocative, often deliberately controversial, the personality at the core of this book invented himself as he reinvented his contemporary world. Moore’s key role—as observer-participant and as satirist—within many literary and aesthetic movements at the end of the Victorian period and into the twentieth century owed ...
The early Middle Ages provided twentieth-century poets with the material to re-imagine and rework local, religious, and national identities in their writing. Poet of the Medieval Modern focuses on a key figure within this tradition, the Anglo-Welsh poet and artist David Jones (1895-1974): representing the first extended study of the influence of early medieval English culture and history on Jones and his novel-length late modernist poem The Anathemata (1952). Jones's second major poetic project after In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata fuses Jones's visual and verbal arts to write a Catholic history of Britain as told through the history of man-as-artist. Drawing on unpublished archival ma...
This is the first full-length study of the poet Ruth Bidgood, who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home. Considering her entire career to date, this volume provides detailed scrutiny of Bidgood’s poetry from its genesis in her formative discovery of mid-Wales in the 1960s to her 2009 prize-winning volume Time Being. Whilst acknowledging the breadth of Bidgood’s poetic work, this book argues that her most important achievement is her creation, over many years, of what has become nothing less than a mid-Wales epic.
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 Clar...
Difficult Reading offers a new approach to formal experimentation in Caribbean literature. In this insightful study, Jason Marley demonstrates how the aggressive, antagonistic elements common to the mid-twentieth-century Caribbean novel foster emotional responses that spark new forms of communal resistance against colonial power. Marley illustrates how experimental Caribbean writers repeatedly implicate their readers in colonial domination in ways that are intended to unsettle and discomfort. In works such as Denis Williams’s The Third Temptation, Wilson Harris’s The Secret Ladder, and Vera Bell’s overlooked prose poem Ogog, acts of colonial atrocity—such as the eradication of Indigenous populations in Guyana, the construction of the Panama Canal, or the disenfranchisement of Afro-Jamaican communities—become mired in aesthetic obfuscation, forcing the reader to confront and rethink their own relationship to these events. In this way, new literary forms engender new forms of insight and outrage, fostering a newly inspired relation to resistance.
Combines historical and contemporary material. Draws on historical, sociological, cultural and literary approaches. Full revised and up-to-date edition of a classic book in the field. Covers the whole field in one volume.