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This comprehensive bibliography of Welsh-English literary translations complements the online BWLET.net database as part of the Arts and Humanities Research Board–funded project. The earliest translations date from the 17th century, and sources for translations vary from manuscripts and journals to video and Internet translations. A brief introduction to the literature of the age and to the translations produced is provided, marked with the translator's own literary, cultural, political, gendered, and historical concerns. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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This volume of the very successful Guide to Welsh Literature series, examines the period from the end of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Apart from the first and last chapters, the book is exclusively concerned with poetry and the practice of the bardic craft. This was the period of the predominance of the cywydd metre, and separate chapters are devoted to seven of its most notable practitioners. The most outstanding of them being Dafydd Gwilym. The importance of understanding the historical background of medieval Welsh literature is again stressed in this volume, and the final chapter emphasizes the links between Welsh prose-writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the broad intellectual movements of the age. ... Read more

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Originally published in 1895.This volume from the Cornell University Library's print collections was scanned on an APT BookScan and converted to JPG 2000 format by Kirtas Technologies.All titles scanned cover to cover and pages may include marks notations and other marginalia present in the original volume. ... Read more

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Explores the role played by the Greek and Latin classics in the literature of Wales, from the sixth century to the present day. ... Read more

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Although the legends of Arthur have been popular throughout Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, the earliest references to Arthur are to be found in Welsh literature, starting with the Welsh-Latin Historia Brittonum which dates from the ninth century. Here, O. J. Padel provides an overall survey of references to Arthur and emphasizes the importance of understanding the character and purpose of the texts in which allusions to Arthur occur. ... Read more

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Gives encyclopedic coverage of Welsh history and culture.ILLUS. Maps.

THIS TITLE IS CITED AND RECOMMENDED BY:Books for College Libraries; Catalogue of the Lamont Library, Harvard College; The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature. ... Read more

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This fifth volume in the Guide to Welsh Literature series covers the nineteenth century and offers a comprehensive introduction in English to the Welsh-language literature of the time. ... Read more

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In 10 critical essays, the emergence of a distinctive Anglophone literature in Wales is traced. This volume begins with a broad survey of pre-20th-century Anglophone literature and attempts to define Welsh writing in English. Subsequent essays deal with industrial fictions, border literature and border identity, Dylan Thomas and his contemporaries, writers living and working outside Wales, popular fiction and the Welsh imagination, the poetry revival of the 1960s, and whether postdevolution literature can still be thought of as Welsh. Authors covered include Caradoc Evans, Jack Jones, David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Roland Mathias, T. H. Jones, John Tripp, Dannie Abse, and R. S. Thomas. ... Read more

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Pioneering essays on mostly 20c poetry & fiction
When I asked a Welsh friend for a survey of recent Welsh literary history, he recommended this, which also goes by "Welsh Writing in English" and is actually the 7th and final volume in the series "A Guide to Welsh Literature"; the other volumes treat literature in the Welsh language. This imbalance shows how recently most of "Anglo-Welsh" has emerged as a contender against Welsh on the shelves. As opposed to Ireland, where two languages have battled it out for half a millenium, the canon of A-W literature remains in its formative stages; some authors going back and forth between the two languages as well.

Since Amazon.com does not have a "look inside the book" offer here, I will simply give a quick peek at its contents. This volume arrives via the CREW project helmed by the editor at UW Swansea. Belinda Humfrey gives a pre-20c run-through, that ends in rather abrupt fashion, not the only essay to do so in this anthology. By the way, no drama is studied. Rather than take a "literary history" approach, the editor M. Wynn Thomas explains that he favored an assortment of critical perspectives from what is still a contested field. Therefore, the tone of the entries varies considerably, while adding to the personal feel of this collection, which admirably avoids jargon and can be read by not only scholars but novices like me productively.

Stephen Knight offers an appropriately deep-delving and penetratingly thorough excavation into what many regard still as the stereotypical 20c "industrial novel"; he provides many examples that explore this long and well-mined strata well.
John Powell Ward scrutinizes the border realms mentally and geographically and the tensions and energies they produce, from Arthur Machen a century ago to Iain Sinclair's typically baroque, po-mo 2001 exercise into his own only recently proclaimed origins, "Landor's Tower." The whole London-Welsh continuum by such as these two bookending writers would have made, in fact, a fine additional chapter, but Ward and others do incorporate some of such cross-border alliances into their sections. Feminism, minority, and gay Welsh writers also gain the notice of critics throughout the volume, which has a helpful list of sources at the back, as well as end-of-chapter notes.

Dylan Thomas and his contemporaries earn James A. Davies' attention--Dylan was the first Welsh writer in English to grab, like his contemporary Brendan Behan in Ireland, the celebrity Celt-as-dissolute bard costume and fit himself into it, for better or worse. The often overlooked efforts of those in his shadow gain by comparison and contrast with Dylan T. R.S. Thomas, Glyn Jones, Idries Davies, Alun Lewis, and Lynette Roberts all deserve renewed readerships.

R.S. Thomas, Tony Conran, Raymond Garlick, Harri Jones, David Jones, and the notably eccentric Brenda Chamberlain all through the century--raised as estranged from Welsh-speaking Wales--sought to construct a less-anglicized identity, and Tony Brown & the editor look at their success or its lack in an involving chapter that should resonate with many readers from "hybrid" cultural backgrounds. Popular images of Welshness, what appealed or appalled earnest writers who learned about the Welsh past and its language, were exported, first and most famously by Richard Llewellyn (whose "How Green Was My Valley" was the first "Welsh" novel I read as a teenager, the only book in my public library under "subject: Wales: fiction). John Harris' chapter starts out rather slowly, and editing perhaps gives it an uneven tone, but his section on the fan letters generated by Llewellyn's best-seller make for the most memorable pages in the entire collection. Such criticism examining reader's responses to texts deserves many more adherents; it takes down from the academic tower into the shops and armchairs how ordinary folks receive and assimilate literature, more popular than most of what scholars analyze.

What happened in the next generation, "the Second Flowering," sparked by the magazine Poetry Wales, is discussed with vigor and frankness rare in a scholarly context by one who was there, Tony Conran. Katie Gramich offers a spirited analogy between rugby and Welsh authors attempting the crossover into the British leagues of fame; the editor and Jane Aaron intellgently examine literary production between the defeat of devolution in 1979 and its success in the squeak-through of 1997. The miners vs. Maggie Thatcher understandably and movingly takes up much of the coverage in these decades as well, and whether a nationalist Welsh cause could sustain itself, and the role played or abandoned by writers in English, make for a valuable essay, in part because it confronts the Marxist assumption that the Welsh economic consternation should have "naturally" reified itself in the cultural and literary productions on a sustained and widespread level of production.

Finally, the noted Welsh activist Ned Thomas (see his "The Welsh Extremist" published by Y Lolfa) approaches the past century and the present one's prospects by charting possible paradigms for literary success in raising alternatives to "false consciousness" in a Wales many of whose residents look more to the multinationals than the nationalists for progress. ... Read more

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This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process.We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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Delivers 500 years in 140 pages: a brisk survey
This 140-page text, with nearly a hundred pictures, gives a brisk overview of the past five hundred years of Welsh writing in English. On pg. 16. Mathias, a noted poet and editor of the "Anglo-Welsh Review," defines his topic: "it implies no mixture of blood" but "it describes those writers who by birth or strong family derivation and residence were Welsh but who, whether from necessity or choice, wrote in English." Today, of course, anyone in Wales chooses to write in one of its two languages. In the beginning, starting in the Tudor period and increasing after the Union of 1536, when Welsh historians and poets first penned texts in English in appreciable numbers they tended to emphasize dutifully the loyalty of the Welsh to the Crown. They concocted stories assuring Britons that those enthroned at Westminster traced their roots to Brutus the Trojan and then to a Welsh monarchy.

Since then, many of those included here tended to explain their country, adopted or native, to the English. The foreignness of Wales could be mined for pathos, praise, satire, stereotype, and romance. The difficulty, as Mathias charts, lay in the fact that much of Wales over the past few centuries lay off limits to most writers in English who lived in the Principality, unless they knew both languages, and few could navigate both tongues with equal facility. Most, and this tendency perhaps grows in the past half-century, exaggerate the strangeness supposedly left in Cambria with an eye towards a London publisher, and a wider audience eager for stock characters, timeworn platitudes, and manufactured lore.

The most intriguing recent authors among admittedly a vastly disparate lot united only by geography remain such as the formidably learned but intriguingly erudite David Jones, who Mathias places within a 'second movement' along with Emyr Humphries' fiction, R.S. Thomas' verse, and perhaps the much less known poems by Raymond Garlick. These writers sought a reapproachment with the older, fading literary culture that emphasized communal duty rather than merely channelling one's muse. Mathias contrasts this disciplined mid-century faction against a 'first movement' sparked by the Joyce-like portraits of a religiously constricted and morally corrupt village that brought Caradoc Evans his first fame in 1915, and then flamed into the laments of Richard Llewelyn, Gwyn Thomas, Alexander Cordell, and others who sought in rural depictions and coal-pit descriptions a vital Welsh sensibility grounded in the peasant and the proletariat. Above all, the talented Dylan Thomas voiced his own alienation from the Welsh tradition in a language he never learned, while echoing its cadences in verbose and dazzling wordplay.

The shadow of Thomas, as Joyce for Irish writers, casts a long stretch across the second half of the past century. Mathias scans the results, and nods at Raymond Williams, John Cowper Powys, and Richard Hughes for their uses of their Welshness. He accurately observes of a less remembered author: "Menna Gallie, who wrote three spirited novels-- beginning with Strike for a Kingdom (1959) -- never adequately followed them up." (118) Gallie's predicament appears common among the later writers Mathias mentions. He finds that the most successful writing (and this book appeared in 1986) comes from criticism such as Ned Thomas' "The Welsh Extremist" and Glyn Jones' "The Dragon Has Two Tongues," as well as Raymond Williams' literary and political criticism, not to forget Kenneth Morgan and Gwyn A. Williams' histories.

In a society so anglophonic today, can the hyphen of Mathias' title still matter? He suggests that for the 'first' and 'second' movements, a counter-movement away from anglicization lingered. The 'first' usually, "involuntarily or otherwise, had an acquaintance with the then receding Welsh language and the different culture that had flourished within it,"-- that of the Nonconformist combination of radical politics and literary craft which since the mid-18th century enabled Welsh people in villages and then cities to keep moored to their legacy, much as they may have resented it, it did keep them informed of an alternative. The writers of the 'second' movement, within which I'd transfer the late J.C. Powys along with R.S. Thomas-- reconnected their own severed strands to the Cymric inheritance. But, now, Mathias argues, the involvement with the Welsh end of the hyphenated identity appears purely a matter of one's own preference.

I interpret this attitude as follows. Many live not in Wales except as a postal address-- they see themselves as part of the United Kingdom or Great Britain. The names of their towns may seem nearly as remote as the Indian terms common across so many of the United States. There's no committment for nearly all but a few idiosyncratic residents of a land occupied by a people who've invaded and taken over another nation to learn the atavistic language or master the cultural remnants, if any exist outside of museums and monographs.

Mathias concludes that since 1950 and especially 1965 ("when the latest of the older writers emerged" from his mid-1980s perspective) the standstill of Welsh at least halted its rural erosion with an urban and school-based revival. (Same as Irish has in the past few years, perhaps, although I'd say the Gaeltacht and the Welsh-speaking enclaves both continue to decline under the pressure of both anglicized tourism and the dependence of the economy on incomers.) He wonders, in fact, if the move towards reclaiming Welsh leaves many learners too optimistically thinking they should try to write by that language's "demanding standard" when sticking to their native English'd be a wiser option and ensure the continued creativity they could bring to their work by their native means of expression. As of nearly a quarter-century ago, then, Mathias ends his reflections doubting that "Anglo-Welsh" can continue to matter as the nostalgia's vanished, the village's modernized, and the shibboleth of not being truly Welsh without a command of Cymraeg continues to shut out so many emerging citizens of Wales who have no "poor but romantic past" in either language to return to, or who wish such a retreat from modern reality.
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.This is an OCR edition with typos.Excerpt from book:Chapter 5,SALESBIJET, MOEGAX, AND PAEEY THE BIBLE TEAUSLATOES. "TlfllE history of the Eeformation is the history of one of the greatest outpourings of the life that cometh from God." And the history of the Eeformation is largely the history of the " Recovery of the Word of God." The story of the last finding of the Law is told by D'Aubigne in a graphic passage describing the university life of Martin Luther, which may be summarized as follows: The young student passed in the university library all the time he could snatch ;from his academical pursuits. Books were as yet rare, and it was a great privilege for him to profit by the treasures brought together in this vast collection. One day—he had then been two years at Erfurth, and was twenty years old—he opens many books in the library one after another, to learn their writers' names. One volume that he comes to attracts his attention. He has never until this hour seen itslike. He reads the title —it is a Bible! a rare book, unknown in these times. His interest is greatly excited: he is filled with astonishment at finding other matters than those fragments and epistles that the Church had selected to be read to the people during public worship every Sunday throughout the year. Until this day he had imagined that they composed the whole Word of God. And now he sees so many books, so many chapters, so many pages of which he had no idea! His heart beats as he holds the divinely inspired volume in his hands. With eagerness and with indescribable emotion he turns over these leaves from God. The first page on which he fixes his attention narrates the story of Hannah and the young Samuel. He reads—and his soul can hardly contain the joy it feels. This child, whom his parents lend to the Lord as long as he liveth; the song of Hanna... ... Read more

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my comment
A very useful guide for students who know nothing about this fantastic literature! ... Read more

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Vernacular prose, both as medium for record and instruction and as means of entertainment, appears in a written form at an early period of Welsh literary history. It was an amalgam of native features with sources and analogues in traditional Celtic literature, and of borrowings and influences from the broader stream of European culture - Old French epics and chanson de geste texts, as well as Latin literature. This collection of essays look at ways in which the so-called native tales, now called "mabinogion", have become literary stories. ... Read more