Locating Lynette Roberts
‘Always Observant and Slightly Obscure'
Editor(s) Siriol McAvoy
Language: English
Genre(s): Welsh and Celtic Studies
Series: Writing Wales in English
- April 2019 · 288 pages ·216x138mm
- · Paperback - 9781786833822
- · eBook - pdf - 9781786833839
- · eBook - epub - 9781786833846
About The Book
Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing – for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between the colours, mythologies and landscapes of the two countries and, in so doing, poses a series of important questions: where, and what, is home? How do we inhabit a particular time and place? This volume of essays brings together for the first time some of the most important research on Roberts’s work that has emerged since the landmark republication of her Collected Poems in 2005. Written by a range of prominent scholars, writers and poets, each essay strives in some way to ‘place’ Roberts, analysing the environments to which her writing responds and teasing out the interwoven skeins of her national, cultural and political affiliations. Together, they pinpoint key concerns in Roberts’s elusive, haunting work, and define her original contribution to twentieth-century literary culture.
Endorsements
‘Siriol McAvoy has assembled essays of impressive range and depth, admirably locating Lynette Roberts’s remarkable body of writing within the contexts of Welsh writing in English, war poetry, international modernism and women’s literature. This collection should be widely read and discussed, for it underlines the continuing and compelling relevance of this Argentine-born and Welsh-identifying poet to our understanding of the intersections between the particular and universal, national and transnational impulses within modernist literature.’
-Professor Daniel G. Williams, Swansea University
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Locating Lynette Roberts: ‘always observant and slightly obscure’- Siriol McAvoy
1.The Scarlet Woman - M. Wynn Thomas
2.‘“You have a Welsh name, are you Welsh?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied”’: Lynette Roberts and Elective Welsh Identity - Katie Gramich
3.‘I remember these things’: Memory, Misrepresentation and Cultural Tradition in Lynette Roberts’s Seven Stories - Michelle Deininger
4.‘What changes break before us’: Semi-Peripheral Modernity in Lynette Roberts’s Poetry and Prose - Andrew Webb
5.Welsh Literary Modernism, Lynette Roberts, and David Jones: Unearthing ‘a huge and very important culture’ - Daniel Hughes
6.‘Crusaders uncross limbs by green light of flares’: Lynette Roberts’s Avant-Garde Medievalism - Siriol McAvoy
7.Burnt Pain and Blasted Seashells: Lynette Roberts’s Estuarine War Writing - Leo Mellor
8.Listening and Location in the Poetry of Lynette Roberts - Zoë Skoulding
9.Lynette Roberts’s The Endeavour: A Generic Adventure - Charles Mundye
Select Bibliography
Index