Writers of Wales – serie

An introduction to the life and work of William Salesbury (c.1520-1584), a scholar and translator of the New Testament into Welsh. William Salesbury is a seminal figure in the literary history of Wales. To his perception of his country's needs and his efforts to meet them, more than to almost anyone else's, are owed the survival and renewal of the language and literature of Wales from the 16th century onwards. The most learned Renaissance scholar in the Wales of his day, he was also steeped in the knowledge of earlier Welsh poetry and prose. He saw the need for a Welsh Bible, did much to bring it about and was the most important pioneer of the printed book in Welsh.

This is an introduction to the life and work of one of the greatest Welsh dramatists of this century. John Gwilym Jones (1904-1988) was also a short-story writer, novelist and literary critic whose work was almost exclusively in the Welsh language. The aim of this book is to present Jones's work to the English-speaking world.

The first full examination in English of the career and works of the most popular Welsh author of the twentieth century. Elis laid solid foundations for the contemporary novel in Welsh on which other writers were able to build in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cysgod y Cryman (1953) he demonstrated not only a mastery of his medium but also a gift for story-telling and the ability to create memorable characters. His novels have been adapted and extended as a television series broadcast in the early 90s. In a popular vote organised by the Western Mail his Cysgod y Cryman was voted Welsh Book of the Century. Some of his novels have been published in English, for example Shadow of the Sickle (1998), and Return to Lleifor (1999).

When Ben Bowen died, aged twenty-five, in 1903, the Welsh literary establishment predicted his immortality. This book looks at the Bowen phenomenon as a product both of his own view of himself as a great poet and a Wales that fed that assumption. It traces his escape from a miner's life in the Rhondda, his stay in South Africa during the Boer War, his talent for controversy and his growing awareness of his early death. This is the first extended, dispassionate account of the life, work and death of the Treorci-born poet Ben Bowen (1878-1903). Published on the centenary of his death, the work seeks to explain Bowen's short-lived fame and subsequent obscurity. It considers his precocious sense of himself as a poet, the literary, social and religious milieu in which he operated, his desire to use poetry as an escape from humble beginnings, and his awareness from his late teens of his impending death. Through a consideration of the life of this compelling character, Robin Chapman also enhances our understanding of Welsh culture in late-Victorian and early-Edwardian Wales.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century cleric, was the first person to compose a detailed and continuous history of Britain from its origins to the domination of the Anglo-Saxons. His writings were enormously popular throughout the western European world, and he is justly credited with bringing 'The Matter of Britain' (including, most notably, the figure of Arthur) to a much wider audience. The vast popularity of this material has persisted to the present day, mainly but not solely in the interest shown in 'King Arthur'. This book illustrates the close ties between Geoffrey's notion of British and Arthurian society and other materials from medieval Wales and Ireland.

This is an introduction to the life and work of Kate Roberts, the most important woman writer ever to have emerged from Wales. It offers a comprehensive account of her life, from her birth into a life of poverty and hardship in the slate-quarrying region of Snowdonia to her death almost a hundred years later in Denbigh; in between, she had attended University, at a time when very few Welsh women did, worked as an impassioned and inspirational teacher in the south Wales valleys, run a major printing press and published the main Welsh national newspaper, Y Faner, helped to found Plaid Cymru, the Welsh Nationalist Party, campaigned tirelessly for the Welsh language, challenged gender stereotypes and restrictions in traditional patriarchal Wales, and produced a body of literary work in the Welsh language which makes her rank alongside Saunders Lewis as the greatest Welsh writer of the twentieth century.

Dorothy Edwards is the first full-length biographical and literary study of this enigmatic valleys-born writer. Combining close textual analysis with comprehensive biography, this book draws on previously unpublished archival material to fill in the details of Edwards' life, and considers her work in the light of her views and experiences. Born in the south-Wales mining valley of Ogmore Vale in 1903, Edwards was raised in a radical socialist household during a period of political debate and industrial strife. And yet despite her upbringing, readers of Edwards' work could be forgiven for initially believing hers to be the work of a middle-class English author. The paradox between upbringing and the literary world that she chose to create is central to Dorothy Edwards. The first of the book's four chapters focuses on Edwards' biography; informed by new manuscript material, it outlines the period from Edwards' birth and upbringing, to the writing of Rhapsody (1927) and Winter Sonata (1928). The second chapter constitutes a reading of the short-story collection Rhapsody in the light of gender theories, while the third section offers the first in-depth study of Edwards' only published novel, Winter Sonata. Finally, the book returns to discuss the year leading up to her suicide on 6th January 1934, which Edwards largely spent in London living with Bloomsbury author David Garnett and his family, and the impact that this experience had on her understanding of national and class divisions. Previously unpublished letters and diary entries offer an insight into her feelings and experiences during this turbulent period.

This is the first full-length scholarly study of the prize-winning poet Ruth Bidgood, a writer who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home.

Welsh Periodicals in English celebrates the contribution of English-language periodicals to the careers of Welsh writers (from Lewis Morris to Owen Sheers) and to the practice of their editors (from Charles Wilkins (1882) to Emily Trahair (2012)). These periodicals have helped to create an active Anglophone public sphere in Wales and continue to stimulate discussion on a wide range of topics: tensions between tradition and continuity; the role of magazines in developing new writers; gender issues; relations with Welsh-language journals; the involvement of the periodicals in social and political issues, and their contribution to cultural developments in Wales. A detailed study of the design, content and editorial practice of the periodicals is illuminated by discussions with living editors, and the book concludes with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary productions and a comparison with their successful equivalents in Ireland.

Tony Brown provides an introduction to R.S. Thomas's life and work, as well as new perspectives and insights for those already familiar with the poetry. His approach is broadly chronological, interweaving life and work in order to evaluate Thomas's poetic achievement, in addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas's poetry, and its development over time. New edition.

A fascinating survey of the numerous references to Arthur found in medieval Welsh literature emphasising the diverse literary genres used and the multifaceted portrayal of the character. New edition.

Gwenlyn Parry was one of the most important Welsh-language playwrights of the twentieth century and played a key role in the popularisation and flourishing of drama in the theatre and on television during the 1970s and 1980s. Parry's major stage plays - Saer Doliau, Ty ar y Tywod, Y Ffin and Y Twr - had a substantial impact, and were instrumental in solidifying a new relationship between drama and theatrical production in Welsh, bringing the theatricality of the Absurd to a popular audience for the first time. His plays have been the subject of much critical attention in Welsh, and have been reinterpreted in production on many occasions, both in their original form and in translation. This study is the first extended treatment of his life and work in English, and examines the complex and occasionally paradoxical relationship between the autobiographical aspects of his writing and his use of theatrical form.

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.

Around the turn of the century, Welsh readers thrilled to the heroic stories of Owen Rhoscomyl. Having been a cowboy, frontiersman, soldier and mercenary, Rhoscomyl was as adventurous and exotic as his stories. Roving the wilds of the American West, Patagonia and South Africa before finally settling in Wales, Rhoscomyl was a flawed hero who led a rough life that exacted a personal price in poverty, delinquency and violence. He identified deeply with the Welsh nation as a source of tradition, legitimacy and belonging within a wider imperial world. As a popular commercial writer of historical romance, imperial adventure, popular history and public spectacle, he rejected accusations of national inferiority, effeminacy and defeatism in his depictions of the Welsh as an inherently masculine and martial people, accustomed to the rugged conditions of the frontier, ready to advance the glory of their nation and eager to lead the British imperial enterprise. This literary biography will explore the vaulting ambitions, real achievements, and bitter disappointments of the life, work and milieu of Owen Rhoscomyl.

Published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2019, this is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of the life and work (excluding only work for television) of the major Welsh writer Emyr Humphreys. During the course of a career spanning half a century, and dating back to the 1950s when he collaborated with the likes of Graham Greene, Patrick Heron, Saunders Lewis, Richard Burton, Siân Phillips and Peter O’Toole, Humphreys has published some two dozen works of fiction (including Outside the House of Baal, the greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature) as well as highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. In addition to offering a critical and interpretative survey of this remarkable, distinguished body of work, the present volume also sets Humphreys’s output in the context of the dramatic, transformative decades in recent Welsh history during which it was produced.

Duncan Bush (1946–2017) was an ambitious, challenging and self-styled ‘working class’ writer from Cardiff, who spent periods living in France and Luxembourg. Following early academic success, he devoted himself to his own prose and poetry and published several volumes of writings that include Aquarium (1984), The Genre of Silence (1987) and The Flying Trapeze (2012). In both personal and political contexts, Bush’s novel Glass Shot (1991) elaborated on feelings arising from the 1984–5 miners’ strike, and his works more broadly express an interest in cinema and the nuanced influence the USA had on his life. The present volume also contains material by Bush not previously freely available in the public domain, including his largely uncollected translations from French and Italian poetry.

"Long overdue . . . it will provide not only a cogent introduction for the uninitiated, but also fresh insight for the many enthusiastic readers, this reviewer included, of Dannie Abse's work." --"Anglo-Welsh Review"

Iorwerth C. Peate's outstanding achievement was to create a National Folk Museum at St. Fagans. It was Peate who dreamt of an open-air museum in Wales on the Scandinavian model where the visitor could view the way of life of past ages. It was he, too, more than anyone else, who strove to see the dream realized and to establish the study of folk life as a respected academic discipline in Britain. The story of these accomplishments, and of the opposition Peate encountered--within the National Museum of Wales, for example--is lucidly outlined by Catrin Stevens. She also presents a clear and useful appraisal of Peate's academic writing in the field of folk studies.

A biography of John Morris-Jones (1864-1929), Welsh grammarian, academic and poet. This book offers a critical analysis of his contribution, as well as a portrait of him as a family man, based on a fascinating series of personal letters to his wife and friends.

An evaluation of the life and work of Sir O. M. Edwards (1858-1920), editor, writer and educationalist who contributed substantially to the fields of Welsh education and literature and worked unstintingly to raise awareness among the Welsh nation of their rich culture.