Writing Wales in English: All That is Wales - The Collected Essays of M. Wynn Thomas — The Collected Essays of M. Wynn Thomas

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Casgliad o unarddeg o draethodau yn trafod gwaith ystod eang o lenorion Cymru, rhai enwog a llai enwog, gan M. Wynn Thomas, un o arbenigwyr pennaf diwylliant llenyddol Cymru yn yr iaith Saesneg.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

A collection of eleven essays on a range of Welsh writers, both well-known and otherwise, by one of the leading specialists in the anglophone literary culture of Wales.

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Cynnwys / Table of Contents

Introduction 1 The Scarlet Woman: Lynette Roberts 2 Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty: a confluence of imaginations 3 ‘A Grand Harlequinade’: the border writing of Nigel Heseltine 4 ‘There’s words’: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and Language 5 ‘A vast assemblage of unease’: Emyr Humphreys’s A Man’s Estate 6 Outside the House of Baal: the evolution of a major novel 7 ‘Yr Hen Fam’: R. S. Thomas and the Church in Wales 8 R. S. Thomas, ‘Retired Christian’ 9 Vernon Watkins, Taliesin in Gower 10 ‘Dubious Affinities’: Leslie Norris’s Welsh-English translations 11 Staying to mind things; Gillian Clarke’s early poetry

Bywgraffiad yr Awdur / Author Biography

M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English and Emyr Humphreys Professor of English at Swansea University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and is the author of twenty books on American poetry and on the two literatures of Wales.

Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

All That Is Wales is the recent, award-winning offering to the world of Welsh letters by the inimitable doyen of Anglophone Welsh literary studies, M. Wynn Thomas. The book comprises a series of eleven probing, suggestively arranged, and always stylish essays on twentieth-century Welsh literature in English, curated from across M. Wynn Thomas’s career. Its Welsh epigraph, ‘er bod hi’n fach mae hi’n ddigon’ (crudely translated, ‘although it’s small it’s enough’), suggests that the book offers a reflection on, and summation of, M. Wynn Thomas’s thought and intellectual contribution to Wales over a career spanning six decades, from a position of retrospect. But in spite of its occasionally wistful tone, the overall feel of this volume is celebratory, resolutely contemporary, and optimistic. Drawing on the concept of ‘microcosmopolitanism’, the introduction seeks to open up what Jan Morris terms ‘epic views of a small country’ – a perspective that highlights M. Wynn Thomas’s rare capacity for looking beyond his own intellectual and cultural horizons without ever losing illuminating focus on the intricate particularities of culture and place. Interweaving personal anecdote with a broader cultural and material history, the introduction goes on to tell an engaging story of a quiet cultural revolution whose effects on Welsh self-perception have been fairly seismic: the transformation of ‘the marginalised cultural phenomenon of “Anglo-Welsh Literature” into the present-day book industry of “Welsh Writing in English”’(p. 19). Although he modestly accredits trail-blazing editors such as Meic Stephens with star roles in this development, the stratospheric rise of ‘Welsh Writing in English’ was nourished by a community of younger scholars, not least of them M. Wynn Thomas, who worked tirelessly and against the contemporary academic grain to claim visibility for Wales’s literature in English. The volume’s choice of authors is eclectic, ranging from the canonical (Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Emyr Humphreys) to the more neglected (Margiad Evans, Nigel Heseltine, poets Vernon Watkins and Leslie Norris). But the essays are carefully arranged so as to elicit conversation around the book’s key themes of co-existence, bicultural identity, and linguistic/psychic borderlines. Demonstrating M. Wynn Thomas’s commitment to recuperating marginalised voices, particularly those of women, the collection begins and ends with nuanced analyses of intersectional gender identities in the work of very different women poets, Argentinian-Welsh Lynette Roberts, and Gillian Clarke. Common to the essays is an interrogation of shared ‘structures of feeling’, or what M. Wynn Thomas calls ‘zone[s] of consciousness’ (p.57). But this is balanced by an attention to the material conditions for twentieth-century literary production in Wales, and his careful scholarship in this area brings ‘the remarkable, self-liberating, culturally hybrid and lawless first generation of Anglo-Welsh writers’ (p. 80) to life. He also has an eye for evocative, intellectually suggestive quotations. Take, for instance, this one, from American Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings : ‘Held in my mouth, the moon became a word’ (pp. 58-9). What could better convey the idea, explored further in the essay on Dylan Thomas, of flesh and imagination transformed into words? All That Is Wales isn’t afraid to tackle the weird, the baffling, the bizarre: in fact, you feel as if M. Wynn Thomas’s writing, which artfully moulds itself in harmony with the cadences of its subject, is energised by this weirdness. Although he is perhaps most at home when discussing Humphreys, Thomas seems to revel most in his descriptions of Heseltine’s darkly comedic short stories, in which ‘Folly possesses its own insane energy, its own crazily creative inventiveness’ (pp. 84-5). M. Wynn Thomas sings the chains of (often transatlantic) literary connections and philosophical ideas like the best of poets. But the reader is welcomed and guided through these sometimes complex pathways of thought by his humorous and gently familiar voice. The overall effect is of having entered into conversation with an amusing, knowledgeable, never dogmatic companion, who has both entertained and questioned and encouraged you to look at the near world expansively and differently.