New Territories in Modernism
Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930-1949
Author(s) Laura Wainwright
Language: English
Genre(s): Literary Criticism, Welsh and Celtic Studies
Series: Writing Wales in English
- March 2018 · 256 pages ·216x138mm
- · Paperback - 9781786832177
- · eBook - pdf - 9781786832184
- · eBook - epub - 9781786832191
About The Book
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.
Endorsements
‘For many, Welsh Modernism begins and ends with Dylan Thomas. This stimulating study argues otherwise, demonstrating that Modernist experimentation was a natural outcome of the growing biculturalism and cultural hybridity of early twentieth-century Wales. Laura Wainwright’s is a bold, original contribution not only to our understanding of Wales’s Anglophone literature, but also to the ongoing scholarly enterprise of pluralising our conception of the Modernist Moment world-wide.’
-Professor M. Wynn Thomas, Swansea University
‘This exciting and original study shows how the cultural and linguistic disruptions of Modernism found expression not just in Paris and London, but also in rural Carmarthenshire and the valleys of south Wales – in the explosive, transformational language of Glyn Jones and Lynette Roberts, in the Daliesque Surrealism of Dylan Thomas, and the Expressionist grotesques of Gwyn Thomas. This pioneering study does indeed take us into new and unexplored territories.’
-Emeritus Professor Tony Brown, Bangor University
‘New Territories in Modernism is a timely, illuminating, often brilliant critical study. Its great strength is that it simultaneously identifies the defining features of Welsh modernism, through meticulous close readings of a diverse body of texts, and situates this national cultural phenomenon persuasively within its wider European contexts.’
-Dr Neal Alexander, Aberystwyth University
Contents
General Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1‘The dissolving and splitting of solid things’: Welsh Modernism’s ‘crisis of language’
2‘Always observant and slightly obscure’: Lynette Roberts as Welsh Modernist
3Vernon Watkins’s ‘modern country of the arts’
4Cadaqués and Carmarthenshire: the Modernist ‘heterotopias’ of Salvador Dalí and Dylan Thomas
5‘Hellish funny’: The grotesque Modernism of Gwyn Thomas and Rhys Davies
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index