Damian Walford Davies – författare

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism’s revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism’s inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism’s "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism’s hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

This work looks at the impact of five "archetypal" figures on literature and culture of the 1790s in Britain. The figures covered are: Tewdrig, the hermit-king; Vortigen, the Dark-Age traitor, the Polish General Kosciusko; Iolo Morganwg; and the Jacobin demagogue John Thelwall.

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic ""myths"" of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, ""The Monstrous Debt"" argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers. Among the questions asked by this volume are: How does Blake's graphic mythology submit to ""redemptive translations"" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might Ted Hughes' strong readings of a ""snaky"" Coleridge illuminate the ""mercurial"" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley ""sustain"" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with supplies of ""imaginative oxygen""? In what ways does Keats enable Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does ""cockney"" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman's poetry out of kitsch into something new and strange? ""The Monstrous Debt"" seeks to broaden our sense of what ""influence"" is by defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era will enjoy this informative volume.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies - just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself - Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies - just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself - Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.

Inspired by the lyrical, mythic mode of Italian sports journalism from the 1930s to the 1950s, Viva Bartali! is a biography-in-verse of the iconic Italian cyclist Gino Bartali (1914—2000), two-time winner of the Tour de France (1938, 1948), known both as ‘Gino the Pious’ because of his fervent Catholic faith, and as Ginettaccio (‘Gino the Terrible’), owing to the short shrift he so often gave the Press.The collection gives us an insight into the complex relationship that underpinned his great rivalry with the campionissimo (‘champion of champions’) Fausto Coppi – the ‘man of glass’ against Bartali’s ‘man of iron’. It was a rivalry that a divided a nation and defined a sport.

Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.

To date, Waldo the prose- writer has been the poor relation to Waldo the poet (he is considered by many to be one of the best and most original of twentieth-century Welsh poets) This collection of all his published prose work, together with a selection of letters and unpublished manuscripts, will enable us to assess the full extent of Williams's literary prowess. The text is accompanied by an introduction and comprehensive annotation.

Devoted exclusively to the appropriation of Wales, its landscape, history, and culture, by writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This volume represents a key intervention in on-going debates about the relation between Romanticism and national identity, antiquarianism, politics, print culture and gender.

A collection of critical essays dealing with the work of R S Thomas. It presents fresh readings of the poet's central preoccupations as well as discussions of hitherto neglected themes, and examines the ways in which Thomas negotiated painful cultural, spiritual and emotional tensions.

This new centenary volume brings together 52 poems – 4 previously unpublished – by RS Thomas to his wife 'Elsi', the distinguished artist Mildred E Eldridge. Together the poems reveal much of the changing (and challenging) dynamics of a complex yet vitally creative relationship. Tender and honest at one moment, ironic and accusatory the next, there are poems on marriage, family, anniversaries and bereavement – offering up a candid portrait of emotional intimacy, the painful process of ageing, and of loss.RS Thomas was born in Cardiff. Ordained as an Anglican priest in 1936, life in the rural parishes of north Wales became the inspiration for much of his poetry; it was in his first post in Denbighshire that he met 'Elsi'. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal in 1964, and nominated for the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. A Penguin Modern Classics Selected Poems was published in 2004, followed by Bloodaxe's Collected Later Poems (2004) and Uncollected Poems (2013). He died in 2000. Damian Walford Davies teaches at Aberystwyth University. His latest poetry collection is Witch (Seren, 2012). He is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Literary History of Wales.

Victorian Cardiff – the world’s busiest port, booming on the back of the coal mined in the Welsh valleys – is vividly imagined through the eyes of the speaker of Damian Walford Davies’s new poetry collection, Docklands: A Ghost Story. It is 1890, and three dark terraces down the docks are to be levelled to make way for a new square. The commission is given to the chief partner in a successful Cardiff architectural firm – a man supremely sure of himself. Yielding to docklands’ temptations, he becomes ever more estranged from a wife tormented by the death of their child. As the square rises from the ruins of the terraces, the louche architect encounters ‘the girl’.A disquieting fin-de-siècle ghost story in verse, Docklands explores grey worlds at the edges of the eye, conjuring late-Victorian Cardiff’s hustling, booming, sullied docks – and the horrors they conceal. A study of the violences perpetrated against wives and daughters, and of patterns of grief and longing, this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires. Seen through the architect’s eyes, the well-to-do streets of an expanding Cardiff and the shady spaces of the docks become the stage for a haunting play of presences that threaten to unravel his uneasy bourgeois world. Among his designs – churches, neo-gothic villas and gargoyles – is a mermaid-figure fountain that becomes a totem of dark desire. The architect’s broken wife, Eleanor, is a central and unsettling presence. Among the architect’s acquaintances – conjured as characters in their own right – is the Irish cabbie, O’Driscoll, who regularly ferries him to dark assignations and who confirms rumours of a ghostly girl; the ‘ladybirds’ or street walkers with whom the architect consorts; and Cardiff’s trade magnates. Also making an appearance in the architect’s social circle are the Dahls –the parents of the famous Cardiff-born children’s author.

To celebrate his tercentenary, Free Verse is an anthology of poems responding to the legacy & ideas of freethinker Dr Richard Price (1723−91) which both scrutinise & channel his legacy as one of the most undervalued architects of the modern world.