Christopher Meredith
Author(s) Diana Wallace
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism
Series: Writers of Wales
- May 2018 · 224 pages ·216x138mm
- · Paperback - 9781786831149
- · eBook - pdf - 9781786831156
- · eBook - epub - 9781786831163
About The Book
This is the first full-length study of the poet, novelist and translator Christopher Meredith, best-known for his novel Shifts (1988), the classic account of post-industrialisation in Wales. It draws on new material from interviews with Meredith to locate his writing in the context of his native south-east Wales. This locale, with its distinctive combination of rural and industrial and its fractured history, informs a concern with place, language and identity that runs through Meredith’s work. Using chapters which pair his poetry and fiction in order to listen to the echoes between them, this study traces the development of his writing and illuminates the shared themes and concerns that connect his texts. Positioning his work in relation to wider critical discourses on the industrial novel and historical fiction, the book argues for Meredith’s international significance as a major writer concerned with place and national identity.
Endorsements
‘Christopher Meredith is one of Wales’s most gifted writers, and Diana Wallace’s study is an exceptionally erudite and deft analysis of his work to date. Situating Meredith in relation to writers such as James Joyce, Raymond Williams, George Orwell and others, Wallace pursues Meredith’s literary preoccupations across novels and poetry, essays and short stories. This book is a compelling study of an author fascinated by language and translations, history and time, work and gender, place and identity.’
-Professor Kirsti Bohata, Director of CREW, Swansea University
Contents
1.Introduction: A writer in his place
2.Working and writing in post-industrial Wales: This (1984) and Shifts (1988)
3.‘Onlooker and participant’: Snaring Heaven (1990) and Griffri (1991)
4.Space, place and time: Sidereal Time (1998) and The Meaning of Flight (2005)
5.‘Edges are where meanings happen’: The Book of Idiots (2012) and Air Histories (2013)
6.Afterword