Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture

Professor Linden Peach is a writer, literary scholar and cultural historian who takes a literary historical approach to Welsh studies. He is a Director of Educational Development at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, London.

An alert and wide-ranging contribution to our understanding of the “entangled empathies”, complex dependencies and multiple environments (natural, agricultural, industrial and domestic) of human−animal relations in Wales’s imaginative writing. Peach’s study is eloquent in its respect for animal subjectivities and humbling in its rebuke of human exceptionalism.’ Damian Walford Davies, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University ‘“The pig is a friend” wrote the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, and Linden Peach’s richly knowledgeable and engagingly written book offers the ideal introduction to the many, deep and deeply ambivalent relationships with animals that populate Welsh literature. Drawing on key themes in animal studies, and connecting deft analysis of specific portrayals of animals to cultural and ecological knowledges about them, the book reveals for the first time that the most innovative contemporary ideas about humans’ relations with animals are profoundly expressed in Welsh literary traditions. This is a most exciting and important addition to literary animal studies.

• Series Editors’ PrefaceAcknowledgementsOverview1 Animals and Animality in a Relational Universe2 Rethinking Animal Contexts: Rural and Industrial Wales3 Emerging Animalities in the Victorian and Edwardian Welsh Press4 Exotic Pets and Spectacular Entertainments5 Brief Encounters6 Birds Over Wales7 Domestication and ‘Domesecration’8 Children’s Book Pets9 Conflicting Cosmologies: Three Stories by Gwyn Jones10 Entangled Empathies: Gillian Clarke and Keith BowenAfterwordNotesSelect BibliographyIndex