Postcolonialism Revisited

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. S. 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.

This innovative book contributes to a paradigm shift in the study of creole languages, forging new empirical frameworks for understanding language and culture in sociohistorical contact. The authors bring together archival sources to challenge dominant linguistic theory and practice and engage issues of power, positioning marginalized indigenous peoples as the center of, and vital agents in, these languages’ formation and development. Students in language contact, pidgins and creoles, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies courses—and scholars across many disciplines—will benefit from this book and be convinced of the importance of understanding creoles and creolization.

For over half a century, Emyr Humphreys's work as a novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist and television producer has been extraordinarily impressive. This pioneering and stimulating book considers Humphreys's fiction from a range of contemporary critical perspectives and stresses its relevance to the 21st century. Drawing on the work of leading modern cultural and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha, psychoanalytic critics such as Melanie Klein and Jacqueline Rose, and gender theorists such as Judith Butler, Linden Peach brings fresh perspectives to the content, structure and developing nature of Humphreys's work, employing, for example, historicist, post-historicist, new geography, psychoanalytic and feminist and postfeminist frameworks. Through detailed readings which highlight subjects such as gender identity, contested masculinities, war, pacifism, strangeness and 'otherness', problematic father and daughter relationships, and cultural discourse in complex linguistic environments, Peach suggests that Humphreys's work is best understood as 'dramatic', 'dissident' and/or 'dilemma' fiction rather than by the term 'Protestant novelist' which Humphreys used to describe himself at the outset of his career. Stressing how Humphreys came to see himself as more of a 'protesting' novelist, Peach examines how the dilemmas around which his fiction is based, originally linked to Humphreys's definition of himself as a 'protestant' writer, increasingly become sites in which controversial, and often dark themes, are explored. This approach to Humphreys's work is pursued through exciting readings of some of Humphreys best and lesser known works including A Man's Estate, A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, the Best of Friends, salt of the Earth, Unconditional Surrender, The Gift of a Daughter, Natives, Ghosts and Strangers, Old people are a Problem, The shop and The Woman at the Window.

Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cŵn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.

In the light of the centennial of the World Mission Conference in Edinburgh (1910-2010), Dutch missiologists reflect on issues on the borderline between missiology and intercultural theology, with some international guests joining the choir. Organized in four parts, their contributions open up new perspectives on the future of the discipline in terms of foundational theology, contextuality, gender, and methodology. (Series: ContactZone. Explorations in Intercultural Theology - Vol. 10)

This book analyses how contemporary Welsh poetry, in both Welsh and English, constructs Wales as both human and physical space, within the context of 'ecocriticism', a literary critical practice that emerges out of environmentalist concern. It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies.

The book subjects male characters in six south Wales novels written between 1936 and 2014 to detailed, gendered reading. It argues that the novels critique the form of masculine hegemony propagated by structural patriarchy serving the material demands of industrial capitalism. Each depicts characters confined to a limited repertoire of culturally endorsed behaviourial norms – such as displays of power, decisiveness and self-control – which prohibit the expression and cultivation of the subjective self. Within the social organisation of industrial capitalism, the working-class characters are, in practice, reduced to dispensable functionaries at work while, in theory, they are accorded the status of patriarchally-sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient and ‘feminised’ in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another. As they negotiate, resist or strive to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of such gendered practices, recurring patterns of exclusion, inadequacy and mental instability are made evident in their representation.

This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends from 1980-2000.