Search results for ""Author Damian Walford Davies""

Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

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This work looks at the impact of five "archetypal" figures on literature and culture of the 1790s in Britain. The figures covered are: Tewdrig, the hermit-king; Vortigen, the Dark-Age traitor, the Polish General Kosciusko; Iolo Morganwg; and the Jacobin demagogue John Thelwall.

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Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.

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Lemon, venetian vetches; orchis, fritillary. How hard to remember an olive tree when the soul is behind bars...Never before published, written 'at white-heat in three weeks' in autumn 1967 after two visits to the detention island of Leros in the Greek Dodecanese, the play is Chamberlain's response - both heartbreakingly lyrical and disturbingly visceral - to the right-wing Colonels' Coup of April 1967. A dangerous, dissident text that draws on the conventions of Absurdist theatre, The Protagonists is the dark culmination of Chamberlain's profound, career-long exploration of individuality, belonging, incarceration, imaginative freedom and the social role of the artist. It is also a startlingly candid articulation of her own emotional and psychological 'internment' at this time.

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Devoted exclusively to the appropriation of Wales, its landscape, history, and culture, by writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This volume represents a key intervention in on-going debates about the relation between Romanticism and national identity, antiquarianism, politics, print culture and gender.

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From a range of perspectives, the essays in this volume tackle some of the most urgent issues facing the creative writer in today's academic institutions. For many years now the professional "creative writer" within universities and other institutions has encompassed a range of roles, embracing a plurality of scholarly and creative identities. The often complex relation between those identities forms the broad focus of this book, which also examines various, and variously fraught, dialogues between creative writers, "hybrid" writers and academic colleagues from other subjects within single institutions, and with the public and the media. At the heart of the book is the principle of "creative writing" as a fully-fledged discipline, an important subject for debate at a time when the future of the humanities is in crisis; the contributors, all writers and teachers themselves, provide first-hand views on crucial questions: What are the most fruitful intersections between creative writing and scholarship? What methodological overlaps exist between creative writing and literary studies, and what can each side of the "divide" learn from its counterpart? Equally, from a pedagogical perspective, what kind of writing should be taught to students to ensure that the discipline remains relevant? And is the writing workshop still the best way of teaching creative writing? The essays here tackle these points from a range of perspectives, including close readings, historical contextualisation and theoretical exploration. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University. C

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