Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies

Andrew Webb

Description

This book uses models of 'world literature' to present this 'quintessentially English' writer as a pioneering figure in an Anglophone Welsh literary tradition, a controversial reading that contributes to the present-day reconfiguration of cultural relations between Wales, England, Scotland
Introduction Chapter One World Literary Studies and Britain Chapter Two The Reception of Edward Thomas Chapter Three Welsh Literatures in their Political and Economic Contexts Chapter Four Edward Thomas and the Welsh Cultural Tradition Chapter Five Edward Thomas and English 'as a foreign tongue' Chapter Six Edward Thomas and England's failed locales

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780708326237
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies
Writing Wales in English
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 1 5/8/2013 12:17:26 PMCREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies
General Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (CREW, Swansea University)
This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major fgure in the
literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for
Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales and, along
with Gillian Clarke and Seamus Heaney, one of CREW’s Honorary
Associates. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making
this series possible.
Other titles in the series
Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)
Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)
Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)
Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)
Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)
Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons
(978-0-7083-2053-2)
Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain
(978-0-7083-2153-9)
Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry
(978-0-7083-2152-2)
Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh
Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)
M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales
(978-0-7083-2225-3)
Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives
(978-0-7083-2216-1)
Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)
Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)
Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)
Damian Walford Davies, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing
in English (978-0-7083-2476-9)
Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845‒1945
(978-0-7083-1987-1)
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 2 5/8/2013 12:17:26 PM
Edward Thomas and World
Literary Studies:
Wales, Anglocentrism and

English Literature
Writing Wales in English
Andrew webb
UnIVerSITY OF wALeS PreSS
CArdIFF
2013
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 3 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM© Andrew Webb, 2013
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any
material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium
by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally
to some other use of this publication) without the written permission
of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the
copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this
publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press,
10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-0-7083-2622-0
e-ISBN 978-0-7083-2623-7
The right of Andrew Webb to be identifed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Typeset in Wales by Eira Fenn Gaunt, Cardiff
Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 4 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM
For Kathryn and Thomas
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 5 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 6 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM
Contents
General Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
List of Abbreviations xiii
Introduction 1
1World Literary Studies and Britain 27
2The Reception of Edward Thomas 46
3 Welsh Literatures in their Political and Economic Contexts 78
4 Edward Thomas and the Welsh Cultural Tradition 109
5 Edward Thomas and English ‘as a foreign tongue’ 139
6 Edward Thomas and England’s Failed Locales 164
Notes 189
Works Cited 204
Index 215
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 7 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 8 5/8/2013 12:17:27 PM
General Editor’s Preface
The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work
that refects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of
modern Wales. Drawing upon the expertise both of established specialists
and of younger scholars, it will seek to take advantage of the concepts,
models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies to promote
a better understanding of the literature’s signifcance, viewed not only as
an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures
in English worldwide. In addition, it will seek to make available the
scholarly materials (such as bibliographies) necessary for this kind of
advanced, informed study.
M. Wynn Thomas
CREW (Centre for Research into the English
Literature and Language of Wales)
Swansea University
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 9 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PM00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 10 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PM
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to trustees of the Edward Thomas Estate for permission
to quote from Thomas’s letters and diaries. Thank you to colleagues at
Bangor University for providing me with the research environment in
which to fnish this project. Sarah Lewis at the University of Wales Press
has been unstinting in her support. The study has benefted enormously
from M. Wynn Thomas’s generosity, wealth of knowledge and professional -
ism. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader whose suggestions
have been very helpful.
This book would not have been written without the support of all those
who contributed to the PhD thesis from which it emerges: Jeremy Treglown
and David Morley supervised it, but key suggestions and advice along
the way also came from Thomas Docherty, Graeme Macdonald, Nick
Lawrence and Michael Bell, all based at Warwick University, and from
Tom Paulin, at Oxford, who was the dissertation’s external examiner.
Thanks to Katie Gramich at Cardiff who, back in 2006, frst drew my
attention to the Welsh context of Thomas’s work. Librarians at Swansea,
Oxford, Warwick, Durham, the British Library, the British Newspaper
Library and the National Library of Wales have helped to make the
research an enjoyable and rewarding activity. Special thanks to Alison
Harvey at Cardiff University Library whose knowledge of the Thomas
archive there is second to none. Above all, thank you to Kathryn and
Thomas for all the patience, understanding and love, and for putting up
with all my time away from home. We could not have done any of it
without Jill, Hugh, Thelma and Charles.
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 11 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PM00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 12 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PM
Abbreviations
References are given in endnotes and subsequently abbreviated in
accordance with series practice. Abbreviations for the most commonly cited
sources appear in the text as follows:
ACP Edward Thomas: the Annotated Collected Poems, ed. Edna
Longley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe, 2008).
BW Edward Thomas, Beautiful Wales (London: A. & C. Black,
1905).
CET The Childhood of Edward Thomas: a
Fragment of Autobiography (London: Faber and Faber,
1938).
CS Edward Thomas, Celtic Stories (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1911).
EF Elected Friends: Robert Frost and Edward Thomas to One
Another, ed. Matthew Spencer (New York: Handsel Books,
2003).
ETAP R. George Thomas, Edward Thomas: a Portrait (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995).
F Tony Conran, Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (Cardiff:
University of Wales Press, 1997).
HGLM Edward Thomas, The Happy-Go-Lucky Morgans (London:
Duckworth & Co., 1913).
HW John Davies, A History of Wales (rev. edn; London: Penguin,
2007).
I M. Wynn Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Tony Brown and
Russell Stephens (eds), Nations and Relations: Writing
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 13 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PMxiv ABBREv IATIONS
across the British Isles (Cardiff: New Welsh Review, 2000),
pp. i–iv.
IW Edward Thomas, Icknield Way (London: Constable and Co.,
1916).
LGB Letters from Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, ed.
R. George Thomas (London: Oxford University Press, 1968).
NCLW Meic Stephens (ed.), The New Companion to the Literature
of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1998).
OOP Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the
Locations of Identity (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
P Edward Thomas, ‘The Patriot’, Nationalist 3/29 (1909),
38–43.
PET Andrew Motion, The Poetry of Edward Thomas (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).
PR Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University
of Wales Press, 2004).
PW Edna Longley, Poetry in the Wars (Newcastle: Bloodaxe,
1986).
R Edward Thomas, ‘Reviews’, scrapbooks 1901–17, 6 vols, Thomas Collection, Cardiff University Library,
Cardiff.
TUL Hazel Davies, ‘Edward Thomas: twelve unpublished letters
to O. M. Edwards’, National Library of Wales Journal, 28/3
(1994), 335–45.
WRL Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans.
M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004).
WWWH Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?: a History of the Welsh
(London: Black Raven Press, 1985).
Note:
Edward Thomas’s idiosyncrasies of place names and personal names in
titles and text (for example ‘Llandebie’ for Llandybie, or ‘Kilhwch’ for
Culhwch) are retained without comment throughout the text
00 Prelims EdwardThomas 2013_5_8.indd 14 5/8/2013 12:17:28 PMIntroduction
The three million inhabitants of Wales are the inheritors of two principal
literary traditions. One is the expression of a modern culture in a Celtic
language, a literature central to Welsh national identity, whose writers
have, since the sixth century, repeatedly reinvented their tradition to meet
ch