Long‐awaited, this seventh and final volume of the critically acclaimed A Guide to Welsh Literature turns out to be the jewel in the crown. Editor M. Wynn Thomas of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, University of Wales, Swansea, has a magic touch, charming splendid and exciting scholarship from his ten fellow essayists.
In his erudite “Introduction” (pp. 1‐6) M. Wynn Thomas deftly poses the key (and controversial) question:
Do we have in Wales one of the youngest literatures in Europe, a post‐colonial “English” literature, alongside one of the oldest literatures in Europe, still written in a Romano‐Celtic language? Or do we have two almost equally venerable literatures?
A wide geographical and cultural perspective is adopted in this study, which has been designed primarily as “a layperson’s guide”. The editor is certainly correct in expecting that:
… it will also doubtless function as a sourcebook for scholars … because, whatever its omissions and limitations, it can reasonably claim to be the most inclusive study of its subject that has been published to date.
There is no uniformity of approach in this volume. Each contributor has been encouraged to follow his/her inspiration. Some follow traditional modes of evaluation, some exalt popular culture. Thematic history joins literary polemic. M. Wynn Thomas explains:
[S]uch an eclectic array of approaches has been deliberately encouraged, as this book is intended to be read not so much as an “objective” account of the Anglophone literary culture of Wales, but as an active contribution to the very culture it seeks to describe, interpret and evaluate.
He stresses the exceptional character of the completed symposium: “This Guide is, therefore, intended to be an intervention in the ongoing discussion between texts that constitute the world of writing. And it is also a contribution to the ongoing process of ‘producing’ a Welsh identity by textual means”. How challenging! How refreshing!
Belinda Humpfrey (pp. 7‐46) critically surveys the Anglophone writers of Wales up to the end of the nineteenth century. In the previous centuries English had been spoken and written by only a small minority of the population. The English language literature of this pre‐modern period came almost entirely from the gentry, the clergy, the professional classes and the bourgeoisie. Many of the writers were English incomers. Of the indigenous Welsh writers, few attained the stature, in English, of the poets Henry Vaughan (1621‐1695) and John Dyer (1699‐1757). Stephen Knight (pp. 47‐90) challengingly considers industrial fiction in Wales, which he characterizes as a “new enormous music”, climaxing in the 1930s. He concludes:
The tradition of the Welsh working‐class novel is one worth honouring and remembering, and one with values that remain potent.
John Powell Ward (pp. 91‐119) takes borders and borderline cases as his theme, highlighting the literary results from the unpopulous Welsh Marches as “rich and surprising”. James A. Davies (pp. 120‐64) contrasts and compares Dylan Thomas with his Welsh contemporaries (so often unjustly undervalued, as in the case of Idris Davies and Vernon Watkins, both prestigious “Faber poets”).
In “The problems of belonging”, Tony Brown and Wynn Thomas (pp. 165‐202) brilliantly dissect the dilemmas faced by major writers such as R.S. Thomas, Tony Conran, Brenda Chamberlain, Rhys Davies and Emyr Humphreys. John Harris (pp. 203‐21) examines popular images, especially the seeming Welsh obsession with self‐image, with “how writing about the country might register in the world beyond”. Self‐consciousness, sensitivity to all shades of adverse comment, angry defensiveness – these abound. Tony Conran (pp. 222‐54), himself a poet of note, traces the relationship between the journal Poetry Wales and the “Second flowering” of the 1960s, when conscious attempts were made to create a Welsh base for Anglo‐Welsh literature. Pre‐eminent in the early Poetry Wales school perhaps was the sentimental nationalist poet Harry Webb. Conran is truly perceptive:
“The Second flowering” played its part in establishing Anglophone Wales as a cultural centre of gravity again, after the Depression and two world wars. No one had to move to London now! But the writers of the “Second flowering” were almost all exiles, incomers or revenants, and to the younger poets who succeeded them, who had mostly lived there (in Wales) all their lives, they seemed out of touch with contemporary Wales and the way Welsh people felt and lived.
Jane Aaron and M. Wynn Thomas (pp. 278‐309) review the vicissitudes of Welsh writing in English from the 1960s onwards, giving special prominence to the new generation of women writers who came to the fore during the 1980s, and to the prevailing influence of peace and ecological movements. Writers are encountering, recording and negotiating that diversity which is modern Wales:
In its very diversity lie its richness and appeal (Ned Thomas, pp. 310‐26).
Thomas, the original commissioning editor of A Guide to Welsh Literature, in his thoughtful “Parallels and paradigms” essay, questions academic assumptions, seeking possible answers from Ireland, Canada, Euzkadi, Catalunya and Africa.
Each essay has its lists of books and articles for further reading, and there is also a valuable Selected list of primary texts (pp. 327‐31). The index (pp. 332‐48) is excellent.
The volume gives us the first authoritative, critical survey of the entire range of Welsh writing in English from the Middle Ages to the present day. It also provides new readings of major writers (Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas, Raymond Williams, Emyr Humphreys), appraisals of many neglected writers, and new approaches to Welsh identity, experienced as constantly changing, depending on how – and from where – it is viewed. Professor M. Wynn Thomas and his learned colleagues deserve our sincere thanks for having crafted such an engrossing compendium of dynamic scholarship, exploring new insights, and new understanding of highly varied and internationally important literature in English. This is a book for all libraries and for anyone with any interest in and curiosity about literature and about Wales ancient and modern. It stirs the grey cells – and the emotions. With its earlier companion six volumes, it will be the point of reference for sober research and pleasurable browsing for many years to come. Arrderxhog!
