Welsh Writing in English

There is relatively little about the Four Branches of the Mabinogi itself in the Mabinogion chapter section. The relevant material needs gathering from scattered points elsewhere, as is done here below.
The book does much to classify types of literature, firstly into four periods and the book focuse the second: 1080 – 1350. Stephens critiques mediaeval bardic poetry as elitist, with strict rules and therefore narrow concerns, though reliable as records.  This contrasts with the popular prose stories which offer portraits of living society, with distinctive social values.
‘Mabinogi’ and ‘Mabinogion’ are given a clear and consistent explanation, which is very useful to grasp the literary context of the 18th-19thC regarding these terms. ‘Mabinogi’ means a pre-Arthurian prose narrative of a personage, with ‘Mabinogion’ as its plural. He gives a helpful translation of Lhuyd’s 1707 categorisation of prose stories in three groups (the original is in Latin); the first is Mabinogion. Stephens then prefers a simple two categories of Mabinogion and other Stories, as pre-Arthurian or post-Arthurian according to their content.
A rare profiling of the (Four Branches of the) Mabinogi is his point that the ‘supernatural’ is essential to its plot ‘machinery’. Annwfn is a key aspect of this which is accessible to some people. He proposes the title Pen Annwfn means Pwyll and Pryderi guard that access. Notably there is no promotion of Pryderi as the hero of the Branches as in later theory; he appears only as Pwyll’s son. Rhiannon is not mentioned. Nor is Gwydion other than in quoted poems. Other major characters, Bendigeidfran, Arianrhod, Lleu are also absent.
He notes the frequent use of dialogue in the Mabinogion, which may indicate a performance drama tradition. He admires Mabinogion free flowing style of language, and the storytellers as part of an  intenrational culture.
Stephens writes in an accessible style, and gives all due credit to his scholarly predecessors, with a good if not perfect provision of references.

This article explores how Dylan Thomas’s engagement with radio creates an innovative collaborative radio poetic. Thomas contributed broadcast essays and features to The Third Programme, The Home Service, The Welsh Home Service and The Eastern Service. Most readers are fully alert to Thomas’s important relationship with BBC producers such as Douglas Cleverdon (Under Milk Wood), but there remains little theoretical or literary analysis of his features for radio. Through archival memos from the BBC’s Literary Output Committee (held at BBC’s Written Archives in Caversham), the article initially considers the institutional relationship between poets and radio.  With specific focus on the postwar broadcast feature about post-blitz Swansea ‘Return Journey’ (TX: 15th June 1947), I examine the history and practicalities of collaboration between Thomas and producer PH Burton, as well as the important social commentary it generates. Finally, the discussion proposes ways of thinking about the sound aesthetic created through the collaboration between the poet and broadcast institution. It concludes by highlighting the importance of creating a critical vocabulary to respond to the sonic text.

This article uncovers the origins of one of the major famous and important literary motif in Welsh literature - Blodeuwedd. It describes its journey from Mesopotamia to Wales through the ages accompanied by its Christian devaluation and modern revival. In the last decades, this Welsh motif has become a successful literary Welsh motif export.

To begin at a beginning, in the tricksterish address that Dylan Thomas made to his “readers, the strangers[,]” in the ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1952 edition of the Collected Poems, he wrote, “I read somewhere of a shepherd who, when asked why he made, from inside tiny fairy rings, ritual observances to the moon to protect his flock, replied: ‘I’d be a damn’ fool if I didn’t!’  These poems with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn’ fool if they weren’t.”  It could be argued that this parabolic anecdote, written late in Thomas’s short, tragic, career suggests a distorted and distorting vision of his Collected Poems.  In its invocation of the emblematic figure of the pastoral tradition; its conjuring of an incantatory, twilit rurality; and its apparent apology for the unrefined, rustic quality of its imperfect paeans of love and praise to humanity and a personal creator, it seems to present to the “strangers” an oeuvre that appears to have more in common with the late-Romanticism of the Celtic Twilight than with a late modernism of the 1940s and the early 1950s.  Insofar as the generative site for the lexis of the more expansive and lyrical poems that Thomas wrote from 1944 onwards is the natural world, rather than the world of the body, it is perhaps understandable that these late “statements made on the way to the grave[‘]”  as Thomas described them, might be regarded as a retreat from the densely textured and obscure modernist expression of the 1930s’ poems into the clarity of a mature, late- or neo-Romantic lyricism that is rooted in the landscape of rural Carmarthenshire.  Rather than interpreting this lyrical turn towards the natural world as a rejection of modernism as a formal means of negotiating the sublime, terrifying and traumatic reality of modernity, in favour of a realist, confessional poetry of place that proffers the consolation of a pantheistic mode of vision, this paper explores how the poems that Thomas composed in the midst and in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ‘Fern Hill’ in particular, actually demonstrate a modernist appropriation, enactment and performance of a pastoralism that is as perfectly and tragically forlorn as it is textually unstable and incomplete.

According to the biographical note printed inside the front cover of Imtiaz Dharker's fourth volume of poetry, Leaving Fingerprints (2009),
Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between Mumbai, London and Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary filmmaker and has published four collections with Bloodaxe in Britain. From the beginning, it appears that Dharker situates her work within a number of different poetic traditions. By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American. Moreover, in addition to situating herself within and between these myriad different national communities, Dharker's work draws also on the cultural resources available in other kinds of community. The community of feminism is one example of this. Communities of language and of religion, communities of writers and of readers, of work and friendship and family are all further examples. This paper will argue that the entanglement both with different national communities and other kinds of affiliations constitutes in Dharker's work a poetic self whose vision and perspective is transnational in scope. This in turn has the effect of promoting in her work a rethinking of traditional notions of nationhood (i.e. Britishness) and belonging in favour of elected transnational affinities. In other words, the nation is defined in her work by its complex relationship to other communities, as the fundamental condition of its existence.

The introduction to my reworked PhD dissertation published as a book: "Inherent Myth. Wales in Niall Griffiths's Fiction", KUL University Press (Wydawnictwo KUL) 2012. It is a reading of Niall Griffiths's work based on the theoretical framework offered by the Tartu-Moscow Semiotic School (Yuri Lotman, Boris Uspensky et al.), focusing on the representations of Wales in 'Grits', 'Sheepshagger', 'Kelly+Victor', 'Stump' and 'Wreckage'

The chapter considers the work of Juliana Spahr and Robert Minhinnick. Their poetry has been productively approached as performing an ecological writing or ecopoetics. This discussion considers the relationship between lyricism and encounters with other places in their war poetry. For Spahr these encounters are with virtual places, mediated through information and newsgathering systems. Minhinnick's travelogue uses the conceit of radioactive dispersal as a way of foregrounding multiple transitions in his work. His lyric attempts a dissemination of self that can establish a sustainable reflection upon war. Ultimately, both poets' shared position of negotiating ideas of encounter in their poetry creates a lyric form that addresses war by focusing on processes of mobility, transition and inclusion.
http://www.brill.com/products/book/placing-poetry Item record/more information http://hdl.handle.net/10197/7180
ISBN 9789042036147

Martine Mussies, “Welshe weemoed”, in: Kelten: Mededelingen van de Stichting A. G. van Hamel voor Keltische Studies 69 (2016): 9.

Martine Mussies, “Welshe weemoed”, in: Kelten: Jaarboek van de Stichting A. G. van Hamel voor Keltische Studies 1 (2017): 17.

Dit artikel is een lexicografische uiteenzetting van het woord hiraeth en een verkenning naar de emoties de er mee worden geassocieerd. Allereerst wordt een overzicht gegeven van het woord in meerdere Keltische talen, vervolgens wordt gekeken naar het gebruik van het woord in de Welshe literatuur en tot slot wordt er gezocht naar mogelijke vertalingen in het Nederlands.

his essay considers works by Robert Minhinnick and Owen Sheers. Concentrating on Minhinnick’s 2008 volume King Driftwood, I examine his response to the Iraq War and how this connects with his earlier experience of visiting Baghdad following the Gulf War. Minhinnick’s travelogues attempt to suture the geographic distance between Iraq and south Wales. Owen Sheers’s verse drama Pink Mist was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 and was published by Faber in 2013. This work offers perspectives upon the impact of the Afghanistan War on veterans and their families. Sheers has also worked with the testimonies and memories of British veterans. For both poets, I consider how the role of the poem as a social document is navigated in their poetics, and whether the poem functions as a transformative site for trauma. I also propose that both poets, in different ways, reflect upon the cultural complexities of Welsh militarism, post-devolution.

This paper will evaluate the work of contemporary Welsh writer Owen Sheers in the light of a number of arguments about Welsh culture, colonial history and postcolonial theory. It will argue that Sheers engages in the practice of 'writing back', a practice commonly associated with postcolonial literatures, but does something slightly different with it. His texts The Dust Diaries (2004), Resistance (2007), White Ravens (2009) and The Gospel of Us (2012) 'write back' not so much to the imperial powers, but to Wales's own distant literary traditions in order to rediscover and reaffirm them. That is, Sheers takes the paradigm of writing back from his reading of the anti-colonial literatures of the 1960s and 1970s and uses it in a different context. This reveals that the resources provided by the 'writing back' model of postcolonial writing have been fruitful to Sheers as a Welsh writer in the years since Wales received a degree of devolved political autonomy from the United Kingdom as a whole, which has also been a period in which Welsh culture more generally has been attempting to articulate its own voice.To make such a claim is not necessarily to suggest that Welsh Writing in English is a postcolonial literature in any reductive or simplistic sense; but to suggest that some of the practices normally associated with decolonising cultures have provided fertile ideas to Welsh writers as they attempt to express that voice.

'Despite the denials of official organs, Wales participated in the great blossoming of poetic culture of those decades between the end of the primary Cold War and the dawn of the New Right, and this unofficial English literary magazine is offering a large-scale celebration of the achievements of Welsh poets whose optimism captured them. The fall of monoliths spills daylight onto the missing half of the picture. The most interesting anglophone Welsh literature of the past century has been in the innovative vein.' editor Andrew Duncan

This essay examines the work of poet Peter Finch and how he integrates  strategies  affiliated to the historical avant garde into poetry that is identified as Welsh Writing in English. The discussion also reflects on Finch's experimentalism through close readings and his relationship to the Welsh Language




http://angelexhaust.blogspot.com/2010/07/angel-exhaust-21-welsh-underground.html

"‘But ach fi I do not care for the oppressive household’: Situating John James’s longer poems

For John James the long sequence enables the inscription of radical and surprising shifts in momentum, patterns of travel as well as spontaneous impressions that often derail the narrative into welcome side alleys. Cast in this light, the longer work becomes an experimental site where changes in register and texture provoke new and unexpected perspectives. While James’s work remains largely under the radar in Wales, the publication by Salt of his Collected Poems in 2004 seems to have animated discussion about his poetry.

Originally from Cardiff, James’s poetry is tangentially associated with the Cambridge School of the sixties and beyond. John Wilkinson’s recollection of James reading in Kettle’s Yard Cambridge in the 1970s emphasises his affiliation with punk. James was not only dressed in bondage, but as Wilkinson points out in keeping with the punk aesthetic James’s writing of the time appeared in duplicated and xeroxed editions of a casualness which makes a Writers Forum pamphlet look like a major production.’  In James’s mock ‘manifesto’ sequence A Theory of Poetry (1977) the poet makes explicit this affiliation by urging any poet:

  & though expensive paper will provide
the physicality your poem needs
you can also apply a bit of boot polish
to transparently tinted over-painting

& in this act of obliteration
performed in a fusion of
calculation cynicism & fervour
the poem will suddenly realize itself (135)

In this paper I will begin by reflecting upon Wilkinson’s claim that James’s early poems would ‘neither be commoditised nor domesticated; they contained and traduced commodities; they bellowed and stammered out of a body made more telling and threatening by its constriction located as male, Welsh and working class, and from which they would behave to be detached as literary art.’ Jones’s poetry supplements a reading of the longer poetic work as a possible site of analysis, interconnection and dynamism. And if these claims seem too diverse for the longer poem, we are reminded of a statement near the close of Jones’s  ‘Craven Images’ that demands from poets ‘rather than be pure accept your multifariousness your pluralism’.
"

This paper examines the significant role that geology and geomorphology play in David Jones’s late modernist poetry. I argue that Jones is interested in geology and geological tropes for conflicting reasons. On the one hand, geology is the study of how the earth’s rock strata are formed and eroded over time; it is essentially a science of change that reveals the metamorphic qualities of locations, territories, and landforms. In this regard, geology plays an important role both in Jones’s dynamic conceptions of place, site, and locality, and in his depictions of historical processes. On the other hand, Jones often treats geology metaphorically as a means of figuring certain spiritual or mythical fundamentals, which are conceived of as essentially ahistorical and unchanging. Hence his stress, in The Anathémata, upon ‘the inward continuities/ of the site/ of place.’ My purpose is to explore this central contradiction between ‘transmogrification’ and ‘continuity’ in the geological imagination of Jones’s poetry, with particular emphasis upon his later work.

This article uncovers the origins of the famous Welsh literary motif Blodeuwedd locating them in Mesopotamia. Thereafter, it displays diverging trends in the use of this motif in the literatures of Wales and England on the one hand and in the continental literature of Germany on the other.

英文原诗：

South Stack, Isle of Anglesey - An Approaching Storm

This place is the point nearest to Ireland from Wales across the Irish Sea.

It is dominated by its lighthouse, a beacon guiding seafarers on this perilous coast.



A hazard lies upon the meeting of waters,

In this fearsome place, on the western sea.

Running with the swiftest, gathering tides,

Centuries of mariners sailed this course,

Drawn, into safety from the siren's cries,

To a refuge in a promised land.

This beacon calls to safe haven, but beware!

Nature may yet have her way and command

The sea as her domain, to deliver peril,

In equal measure to the timid or the brave.

                                                                   

  Ray Murphy, Artist
The Confucius Institute, Bangor University
  October 2015





威尔士语译本：

Ynys Lawd, Môn
A Storm ar Dorri



Y mae perygl ynaros pan gyfarfyddo’r dyfroedd,

Yn y man ofnadwyhwn, ar fôr y gorllewin.

Gan fordwyo â chynulliady llanwau cyflymaf

Yr hwylioddcanrifoedd o forwyr y llwybrau hyn

I ddiogelwchrhag llefain y seirenau,

I noddfa mewngwlad addewid.

Geilw’r oleufahon i hafan ddiogel, ond gochelwch!

Gall natur etowneud fel y myn a gorchymyn

Y môr fel eiharglwyddiaeth, i gyflenwi enbydrwydd

I’r ofnus a’rdewr yn ddiwahan.



Cyfieithu Cymraeg gan Wyn Thomas



中文译本：

渔家傲· 暴雨即临



乙未中秋，登威尔士安格尔西岛南栈，所站之处，极近爱尔兰，灯塔近处可见，临爱尔兰海，海域暗流凶险，灯标指引航运。暴雨即临，望洋兴叹，故作此篇。



海接云涛千水聚，浪潮翻卷惊天语。

西海茫茫渔舸续，深险去，海妖塞壬琴笛曲。

寻梦扬帆不畏惧，塔灯警戒求安旅。

万物道常存海域，福祸律，羸强勇懦皆同御。



作者：瑞·墨菲

班戈大学孔子学院

2015年10月

译者：许景城

2015年10月14日

于班戈大学英语文学院


我坐在世界的尽头看灯塔
许景城（Peter Jingcheng Xu） 作


海风不时激起浪花拍打
在悬崖峭壁的足踝骨，
日积月累留下
难以愈合的伤痕。
岩岛伫立着一座威严的灯塔，
裹着一件白绿相间的外衣，
寒风凛冽中，挺拔，从不退缩。
在固定或不固定的时刻
打开头上那颗天眼，
如璀璨明珠，光彩夺目，
飞快射入淡淡迷雾
笼罩的海面上，
不眠不休地指引
成千上万的游舸穿梭
在四季繁忙的爱尔兰海，
在贝尔法斯特、霍利海德、
都柏林之间自由航行。
望着远处一艘邮轮
冒着乌黑的浓烟，
如一只毛笔游走
在灰白的宣纸上：
起始的浓厚随着主体
驱动慢移，逐渐
消失在灰白中。
坐在悬崖边，寒冷的海风
迎面吹来阵阵熟悉
而又陌生的味道。
不禁问，曾几何时，
海的咸味夹杂着一股腥味、
油烟味以及其他各种
难以言状的味道？
倘若不是海风，双眼
恐怕将被迷雾遮蔽，
如若不是灯塔，
海水的味道不知
又将增添多少忧愁、
多少负担，多少苦难。
我隐约听到海面下哭泣
在回荡，时光在骷壳中奔流。
仿佛一切回到了
大约俩世纪以前，一个寒冷秋日，
突然乌云密布，天色昏暗，
海浪猛烈地拍击
岩岛的腰部，
只见大海深处
有一条黑亮如巨蟒的闪电
在“皇家宪章”号上方
张牙舞爪，
刹那间，一声巨雷
由远及近地传来，
将灯塔置身于漩涡
震波的正切线上，
犹如幽灵一般
伺机引诱它
坠入崖下的深渊。
塔门被暴风无情地吹锁上，
塔内所有灯光业已被吹熄，
琼斯正值巡逻归来，
极力撞击门窗，
却是徒劳无功。
暴雨顷刻而至，
随着狂风咆哮，
吞没他的歇斯底里。
雷声不断，震波的引力
猛烈地推吸
他颤颤巍巍的身子
从悬崖跌落，重重地
将头摔在石壁上，
鲜血直流，与波涛
汹涌、共舞、
咯咯直笑，
黑暗吞噬万物，
宁静滴落
在另一世界，
成了他永恒的坟墓。
从此，幽灵经常出没
或在灯塔上方，无声无息，
或在光难以垂爱的黑暗中，
或总在夜深人静之时
在月光下独坐
在崖下的岩石上，
吹着塞壬一样的青色笛子，
或弹着威尔士的竖琴，
像是在对岛上的花草树木、
海上的船只、海里的生物，
倾诉自己的所遭所遇。
此刻，在黄昏中我俯瞰
那块痕迹斑斑的岩石：
他毫无踪迹。
一只黑色的海豹正探出
光滑的脑袋，屈浮在海面，
双眸朝那块岩石方向凝视，
像在朝拜灯塔，
像在祷告，又像在哭泣，
久久不肯离去。
我坐在世界的尽头看灯塔，
望着海天相接处雾中红点，
在凄冷中略感丝丝的暖意。
北方的冷从未被南方的暖
因为风的同情而做出让步，
而地中海的问候顺着暖流
北上来到了凯尔特的故土，
随着灯塔钟声的起伏旋律，
泛起阵阵久违的清香涟漪，
糅合远处海豹与海鸥啼声，
在岩石新“金钉子”处回荡，
沁人心脑：久久挥之不去。
班戈梅奈观海楼
2017.6.27-2017.6.30

The article offers an intermedial reading of Lloyd Jones's novel "See How They Run", part of the series that comprises novels retelling eleven tales from the earliest extant British collection of prose fiction known as the Mabinogion. In the article I explore verbally transmitted explicit and implicit references to the visual medium which, as I demonstrate, are used to repackage some of the most archaic aspects of the original text. By employing a theoretical framework developed by Boris Uspensky in his "A Poetics of Composition. The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form", I argue that the novel's pictorial dimension mirrors perspectival systems of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting. I conclude that the transfer from the former to the latter, together with other visual elements, constitutes a significant component in Jones's strategy to transcribe the mythological and religious substratum of the medieval original.

The article offers an intermedial reading of Lloyd Jones’s novel See How They Run, part of the series that comprises novels retelling eleven tales from the earliest extant British collection of prose fiction known as the Mabinogion. In the article I explore verbally transmitted explicit and implicit references to the visual medium which, as I demonstrate, are used to repackage some of the most archaic aspects of the original text. By employing a theoretical framework developed by Boris Uspensky in his A Poetics of Composition. The Structure of the Artistic Text and Typology of a Compositional Form, I argue that the novel’s pictorial dimension mirrors perspectival systems of Renaissance and pre-Renaissance painting. I conclude that the transfer from the former to the latter, together with other visual elements, constitutes a significant component in Jones’s strategy to transcribe the mythological and religious substratum of the medieval original.

Extant scholarship offers much insight into the twentieth-century British writer Edward Thomas;
but his work has not yet been examined through an Eastern lens. This article situates Thomas’s
poetry within a Daoist, ecological framework. Recent scholarship explores the usefulness of
Daoism, a Chinese philosophy established prior to the Qin period (221 BC), to contemporary
ecocriticism, which my discussion extends. I draw Daoist parallels with Thomas’s portrayal of
nature as an impartial, merciless force, and his speakers partially relinquishing worldly desires.
In addition to revealing international, ecological resonances of Thomas’s poetry, this critical
paradigm invites Daoist approaches to other Western writers.

Reviews of Deborah Kay Davies’s 2018 novel Tirzah and the Prince of Crows praised its attention to sensory detail and the deep engagement with nature shown by its protagonist, Tirzah, as she passes from adolescence to adulthood within a small religious community in 1970s Wales. This article explores some of the many ways in which meaningful sounds affect Tirzah’s struggle against the social restrictions placed upon her by the Noncomformist ideals of her family and community. I call the sonic element of Tirzah’s struggle ‘the pulpit’s audible shadow’ in tribute to M. Wynn Thomas’s idea of ‘the shadow of the pulpit’, which traces the influence of Nonconformism on Welsh writing in English. While Thomas identifies key sonic details of Nonconformist life – ‘public prayers, testimonies, confessions, groans, tears, exclamations’ – there has been little analysis of the effects produced by Nonconformist sounds outside chapel walls. In Davies’s novel, the pulpit’s shadow is audible whenever Tirzah’s emotional development is linked to her experience of sonic effects which, as defined by the theorists Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue, emerge in the interrelationship between a sound, its physical and social context, and the experiences of the people within its range. The sonic effects of repulsion and filtration, for example, articulate Tirzah’s antagonistic relationship to her father and his religion. Repulsion, an effect ‘that produces, in an uncontrolled or conscious way, an attitude of rejection and behaviours of flight’, deters Tirzah from chapel life and guides her towards her own private theology. Filtration, ‘a reinforcing or weakening of specific frequencies of a sound’, subtly shapes the relationship between Tirzah and her father within the walls of their house. Overall, Davies’s careful representations of religiously-inflected audible events allow us to imagine the social and personal significance of historical sonic experience in Wales.

The poetry of David Jones negotiates between a variety of British cultures, traditions, and geographies.  While the verbal texture of his poems weaves together the linguistic diversity of Britain’s Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Latinate cultures, Jones is also attentive to the role of place (or “site”) in shaping their interrelatedness.  Both The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord dramatize what John Kerrigan (Archipelagic English, 2010) has termed an “archipelagic” understanding of the relationship between Britain’s peoples and cultures.  Indeed, Jones’s poetry and essays might together comprise the most “archipelagic” body of work in British and Irish modernism.  If Kerrigan’s notion of the archipelagic can deepen our understanding of Jones’s vision of Britain, that vision in turn brings to the archipelagic new historical and even geological depth.  While scholars such as John Brannigan (Archipelagic Modernism, 2015) have emphasized the ecological and geographical dimensions of Irish and British modernism, the historical dimension of relationships among and between the Isles, as represented in modernist writing, has been less thoroughly investigated.  This essay explores Jones’s archipelagic vision of Britain, showing how it is shaped by his historical and geographical understanding of the relationships between peoples, cultures, and languages.  The early Middle Ages, as a time prior to the establishment of English hegemony in Britain, are a particularly important period in Jones’s poetry and prose, and take on new importance in an archipelagic reading of Jones’s work.

Psychogeography, which is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior (sic) of individuals’ (Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, 1955), is a practice that can be incorporated into a range of critical theories regarding the representation of place in literature. Having gained recent prominence as a creative practice – rather than the more rigorous, objective framework originally conceived of by Debord – psychogeography has become as diverse as it is ubiquitous. The aim of this presentation will be to explore the impact of psychogeography in contemporary, post-devolution Welsh literature, with the focal point being Seren’s Real series, a contemporary collection of Welsh psychogeographical texts that can trace its genesis back to a Planet article written by series editor Peter Finch in response to the 1997 referendum’s impact in Cardiff. Principally, three main areas will be discussed: (a) the influence of the proto-psychogeographical projects of the early twentieth century, such as can be found in the work of Arthur Machen, (b) the series’ relation to wider networks of psychogeographical excavation being conducted throughout twenty-first century Britain, and (c) their potential integration into more mainstream traditions of travel writing. Contemporary critical theory, principally Literary Geography and the more continentally-influenced Geocriticism, will be utilised. This presentation will illustrate the importance of psychogeography, in both theory and practice, to a discussion of devolution in Welsh and British literature.

What is the Gower dialect? Where did it come from, and is it still used today?

In this book you will not only find discussion about the history of the dialect – one of the oldest English dialects outside England – but also a range of old historical Gower words split into several thematic chapters. From describing words to words for food and drink to animal and plant terms to names for objects, people, & events, and a list of local idioms and phrases.

We hope this book will suit many readers. Whether you’re a local resident interested in local language history, a writer interested in adding old Gower dialect to their stories, a chef looking for recipe ideas, or even a botanist interested in old names for plants, look no further than The Gower Glossary!

Read the free ebook: https://issuu.com/swansea/docs/44028-18_gower_glossary_english?e=1073324/66015709

'...a thorough and erudite discussion...Bohata performs an admirable and fair-minded feat in weighing up the pros and cons of such an approach in her excellent opening chapter.' 'As a postcolonial theoretical intervention which takes a materialistic view of literary production, Bohata's book could hardly be bettered. As such, it is a very welcome addition to a critical field which is now really coming of age.' Planet 'This is a persuasive, illuminating and powerfully argued book. The range of writers chosen to support Bohata's case ... is impressive, and discussions of their work are integrated seamlessly and productively within the book's broader concerns. Indeed, a genuinely productive engagement of theory and text is one of Postcolonial Revisited's key achievements, Bohata's dialectical readings of the two rewarding the reader with a greatly enriched understanding of both'. New Welsh Review '...Bohata's pioneering work promises to widen the Celtic postcolonial map further to embrace what has proved to be the most intractable terrain of Welsh writing. There is much...here that is of interest, not only to those interested in Welsh literature, culture and history, but to anyone curious about the ongoing reverberations and transformations of post colonialism...This nuanced and engaging study promises to become a central text in the new and evidently fecund critical ground of Wales and colonialism'. Modern Language Review

"Abstract: Crime fiction is a genre bound by strict laws and conventions. Early literary commentary often focused on analysing these rules and classifying it into sub-genres. The strict patterns and structures of crime fiction are reflected in the work of the narratives themselves, which, with the detection and punishment of those who transgress society’s rules, seek to re-establish order on the world. As such, crime fiction has been described as a masculine genre, despite its increasing female authorship, for it supports and restores a patriarchal world after the anarchistic act of crime. Nevertheless, there are some interesting developments appearing in crime fiction which challenge conventional structures. This paper proposes that Alison Taylor’s Simeon’s Bride uses themes from an older genre, the Female Gothic, to create a new hybridised genre in which gender constructs are challenged and subverted, and, in doing so, moves crime fiction away from its masculine strictures."

According to the biographical note printed inside the front cover of Imtiaz Dharker's fourth volume of poetry, Leaving Fingerprints (2009), Imtiaz Dharker was born in Lahore, Pakistan, grew up a Muslim Calvinist in a Lahori household in Glasgow and eloped with a Hindu Indian to live in Bombay. She now lives between Mumbai, London and Wales. She is an accomplished artist and documentary filmmaker and has published four collections with Bloodaxe in Britain. From the beginning, it appears that Dharker situates her work within a number of different poetic traditions. By extrapolation, this implies that Dharker herself belongs to a number of different communities in a global sense: Indian, Pakistani, British (including but nevertheless distinct from Scottish and Welsh), and even – as some of her poems portraying transnational feminism make clear – American. Moreover, in addition to situating herself within and between these myriad different national communities, Dharker's work draws also on the cultural resources available in other kinds of community. The community of feminism is one example of this. Communities of language and of religion, communities of writers and of readers, of work and friendship and family are all further examples. This paper will argue that the entanglement both with different national communities and other kinds of affiliations constitutes in Dharker's work a poetic self whose vision and perspective is transnational in scope. This in turn has the effect of promoting in her work a rethinking of traditional notions of nationhood (i.e. Britishness) and belonging in favour of elected transnational affinities. In other words, the nation is defined in her work by its complex relationship to other communities, as the fundamental condition of its existence.

The paper examines Cynan Jones’s novel Bird, Blood, Snow in the context of the medieval Welsh prose romance “Peredur Son of Efrog”, part of the collection of medieval Welsh tales called the Mabinogion. The provenance of the original tale has been widely debated as it survives in four versions and has parallels both with French literature (most notably Chrétien de Troyes’s Perceval) and native Welsh storytelling tradition. This article focuses on the visual insets present in the medieval tale and Jones’s text, and demonstrates that the complex network of intertextual relationships between the multiple versions of “Peredur”, along with the trends in the academic debate centred around it, is reflected in Jones’s novel by means of the compositional devices characterised by the oscillation between the verbal and the visual.
Full text: https://ojs.tnkul.pl/index.php/rh/article/view/14529

Jamie Harris goes in search of Welsh utopian visions, via folklore, history, literature, politics, art and architecture. With the Far Right gaining a foothold in the Senedd, he reflects on the consequences of the Welsh political leadership’s resolutely anti-utopian stance.

One question that has dominated discussion of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings is how to take account of their literary form when determining their meaning and purpose. This article contends that by paying greater attention to the reception of Kierkegaard’s writings in works of creative literature we can learn a significant amount about the interaction of aesthetic form and theological content within them. To demonstrate this, it conducts a close reading of seven poems about Kierkegaard by the twentieth-century Welsh poet and priest R. S. Thomas (1913-2000).

Each of Thomas’s poems situates the experience of writing and reading Kierkegaard’s works on a sequence of spatial, psychological and literary peripheries. By doing this, they illustrate how those works decentre and destabilise the single individual reader aesthetically in a manner that correlates with the necessary decentring and destabilising of the individual self before God. They illustrate, too, a correspondence between the sensation of aesthetic collapse that accompanies the ultimate incommensurability of form and content in Kierkegaard’s writings and the sensation of spiritual collapse that accompanies a recognition of the incommensurable paradox at the heart of Christian faith.