Emyr Humphreys
Writing Wales in English
CREW 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 figure 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.
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)
Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)
Chris Wiggington, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)
Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales (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 Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)
Harri Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)
Emyr Humphreys A Postcolonial Novelist?
Writing Wales in English
DIANE GREEN
© Diane Green, 2009
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 or under the terms of a licence issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. 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 978-0-7083-2217-8
e-ISBN 978-1-7831-6369-4
The right of Diane Green to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77, 78 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The publishers wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales in the publication of this book.
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: Branwen by Christopher Williams © MairRabagliatti. Reproduced by permission of City and County of Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Collection.
CONTENTS
1 Postcolonialism and Wales: the Effects of Cultural Imperialism
2 ‘A serious Welsh novelist’: Redressing the Balance
3 The Emergence of Humphreys as a Postcolonial Writer
4 The Consolidation of Strategies in Outside the House of Baal
5 Strategies of Resistance: the Use of Indigenous Myth
6 Strategies of Resistance: the Use of Indigenous History in ‘The Land of the Living’ Sequence
7 Strategies of Resistance: the Use of History in the Independent Novels of the 1980s and 1990s
8 Monstering and Disabling: Paradigms and Tropes of Dispossession
9 Postscript: Speaking Welsh in English – a Postcolonial Purpose
A Selected Bibliography of Emyr Humphreys’s Fiction and Essays
A Selected Bibliography of Writing on Emyr Humphreys’s Works
The aim of this series is to produce a body of scholarly and critical work that reflects 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 significance, viewed not only as an expression of Welsh culture but also as an instance of modern literatures in English world-wide. 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 of Wales) Swansea University
