Kirsti Bohata – författare

Postcolonialism Revisited is a ground-breaking book, the first to explore and analyse Anglophone Welsh writing, both literary and otherwise, in the context of contemporary thinking about colonial and post-colonial cultures. Kirsti Bohata considers how far the paradigms of postcolonial theory may be usefully adopted and adapted to provide an illuminating exploration of Welsh writing in English, while simultaneously considering the challenges that such writing might offer to the field of postcolonial theory. In addition to dealing with a range of theorists in the field, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Charlotte Williams and Homi Bhabha, the book looks at how Wales has been constructed as a colonized nation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing. Themed chapters include the treatment of place in English- and Welsh-language writing of the 1950s and 1960s; hybridity and assimilation; the position of the Welsh as 'outsiders inside'; the women's movement in Wales during the fin de siecle; and postcolonial understanding of linguistic power struggles. A variety of forgotten writers have been unearthed in this study and are considered alongside more famous names such as R. Thomas, Margiad Evans, Arthur Machen, Christopher Meredith and Rhys Davies. Written in an accessible style, Postcolonialism Revisited will be required reading for those involved in the study of Welsh writing in English.

Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being 'rediscovered' by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans's extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust.Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust.Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. An electronic version of this book is also available under a Creative Commons (CC-BY-NC-ND) license, thanks to the support of the Wellcome Trust.Coalmining was a notoriously dangerous industry and many of its workers experienced injury and disease. However, the experiences of the many disabled people within Britain’s most dangerous industry have gone largely unrecognised by historians. This book looks at British coal through the lens of disability, using an interdisciplinary approach to examine the lives of disabled miners and their families. A diverse range of sources are used to examine the economic, social, political and cultural impact of disability in the coal industry, looking beyond formal coal company and union records to include autobiographies, novels and existing oral testimony. It argues that, far from being excluded entirely from British industry, disability and disabled people were central to its development. The book will appeal to students and academics interested in disability history, disability studies, social and cultural history and representations of disability in literature.An electronic edition of this book is freely available under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) licence.

An edited collection of essays, interviews, and book reviews by M. Wynn Thomas.For more than half a century, M. Wynn Thomas has been Wales’s foremost literary critic. His ground-breaking work – on subjects ranging from Welsh Puritanism to Walt Whitman, from religious Dissent to contemporary poetry – has opened up new vistas and literary correspondences for his readers. Thomas’s writings combine a deep historical knowledge, a commitment to pluralism and a relationship to the literary text that is both sympathetic in approach and detailed in analysis.Made up of previously unpublished and uncollected essays, interviews, and reviews on Welsh and American writers, the writings in Transatlantic Vistas engage with some of the abiding interests of Thomas’s career: Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas, and American authors such as Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Anne Stevenson and more. Including a foreword by Helen Vendler and essays by Daniel G. Williams and Kirsti Bohata, this volume celebrates M. Wynn Thomas’s immense contribution as a literary and intellectual historian, critic, translator, lecturer, institution builder, editor, broadcaster and literary executor as he enters his eightieth year.

The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018) including work by John Sam Jones, Sian James, Rhys Davies, Deborah Kay Davies, Aled Islwyn, and Kate North.New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership.An accessible but scholarly introduction places the writers and their stories in their historical and literary contexts.In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world.Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings - a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places.