"Welsh Writing in English: A Yearbook of Critical Essays" is an established and thriving journal which is the natural place for young scholars to submit new, cutting-edge research, while it also has the prestige to attract the big names in the field. This volume edited by Katie Gramich has more submissions of a comparative and interdisciplinary nature, as well as more international participation including some startling original research on Raymond Williams and innovative essays on Rhys Davies, Edward Thomas and Glyn Jones. 'Setting a new agenda and a new standard for literary criticism in Wales' - Dafydd Johnston, Professor of Welsh at Swansea University. 'Hearteningly unafraid of courting controversy' - Clare Morgan of Oxford University. 'Fill[ing] a huge gap ...I can't think how we ever did without it' - John Powell Ward, former editor of "Poetry Wales".

When the author is given a small package, containing letters and papers relating to his grandfather's brother, who was killed in Syria during the Second World War, it leads him on an extended personal journey. An exploration of history, imagination and the process of memory, shifting imperceptibly from autobiography to travelogue, from letters and diaries to official records. In his first prose work Lewis reveals a rare and consummate literary talent. Deeply rooted in his Welsh identity, this young writer locates his own and his family's experience within the wider European world in a thoughtful, mature and highly original book.

Snowdonia, 1880, and Jane Gruffydd is a newcomer to the district, dressed to the nines and almost fainting in the heat of the interminable prayer meeting out on the mountainside...In the pages of this classic 1936 novel, we see the passionate and headstrong Jane grow up and grow old, struggling to bring up a family of six children on the pittance earned by her slate-quarrying husband, Ifan. Spanning the next forty years, the novel traces the contours not only of one vividly evoked Welsh family but of a nation coming to self-consciousness; it begins in the heyday of Methodist fervour and ends in the carnage and disillusionment of the First World War. Through it all, Jane survives, the centre of her world and the inspiration for her children who will grow up determined to change the conditions of these poor people's lives, to release them forever from their chains.

A critical commentary on Welsh fiction in the 20th century, this compilation features writing and new research by established and emerging critics. Aimed at engaging with both the Welsh literary past and present in a lively and informed way, this edition includes incisive and innovative essays on the work of figures such as Salvador Dali, Rhys Davies, Caradoc Evans, J. O. Francis, Glyn Jones, Edward Thomas, R. S. Thomas, Raymond Williams, and W. B. Yeats. Focusing on comparative and interdisciplinary essays as well as a more international framework, this newest edition is sure to interest established academics and students in the field of literary criticism.

"Almanac: The Yearbook of Welsh Writing in English" is a stimulating academic journal featuring new research by established and emerging critics in the field. Almanac aims to engage in a lively and informed way both with the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing, looking towards the future and outwards towards the rest of the world. This edition includes two incisive and innovative essays on the towering figure in modern Anglophone Welsh poetry, R. S. Thomas, relating his work to that of W. B. Yeats and to Irish writing generally. It also offers important new critical evaluations of unjustifiably neglected literary figures, namely Hilda Vaughan, William Emrys Williams and Nigel Heseltine. The science fiction of the Welsh-language writer, Islwyn Ffowc Elis, is subjected to probing analysis, while the turn-of-the-century London-Welsh magazine, The London Kelt, reveals much about the construction of Wales in exile. Finally, the early issues of Poetry Wales are found to be more international in outlook than previously assumed. The edition also includes the indispensable annual bibliography of criticism in the field. All in all, "Almanac" continues with its mission to engage with and stimulate its readers with a range of thought-provoking and illuminating new material.

Gwerful Mechain is the only Welsh female poet from the late middle ages whose poems have survived as a substantial body of work. One of the most immediately striking characteristics of her poetry is the easy coexistence in her oeuvre of devotional and erotic works. Even to those who may be familiar with the bawdiness of Chaucer or Boccaccio, Gwerful's work is remarkably direct. Yet, as the introduction discusses, some coexistence of the erotic and the religious was not entirely untypical of medieval literary production in Wales; overall, indeed, one of the most important characteristics of Gwerful's work is its position in the mainstream of medieval Welsh poetry. Her themes and techniques do not mark her as a marginal or isolated figure, participating in some putative female sub-culture; on the contrary, she engages in poetic dialogues with her male contemporaries, using the same forms, tropes, and vocabulary as they do, and jousting with them verbally as their equal. At the same time, she often speaks with a female voice, taking her peers to task for their male arrogance. All of Gwerful's known work is included here-as are several poems of uncertain authorship, and a number of other works that help to fill in the historical and literary context. A unique feature of the volume is the provision, for each work of medieval Welsh poetry included, of two different translations. The first, a literal translation, is presented in facing page format opposite the original Welsh; a second, freer translation, with rhyme patterns approximating those of the original, follows.

This is an excellent collection of essays on the early twentieth-century writer, Margiad Evans, a distinctive and original writer whose talent has been little recognized. The contributors draw on a wealth of undiscovered archival resources in this scholarly and engaging account of many different aspects of Evans's life and work, including her identity as a woman, her epilepsy and medical condition, and her gothic imagination. Professor Mary Joannou, Professor of Literary History and Women's Writing, Anglia Ruskin University This is an important book, and an interesting one. The contributors include many of the most distinguished scholars of Welsh Writing in English, and between them they do a marvellous job of remembering Margiad Evans, an author for whom memory was centrally important. Evans's very liminality has seen her disappear between the cracks of a number of scholarly preoccupations, squeezed out of literary history by masculinist and high-culturalist assumptions about Modernism, and by colonialist assumptions about Wales. The rigid thinking of conventional literary aesthetics has done Margiad Evans a great disservice, and the editors and contributors to this book have done wonders to redress this. Professor Darryl Jones, School of English, Trinity College Dublin

Featuring new research by established and emerging critics, this stimulating academic journal aims to engage in a lively and informed way with both the Welsh literary past and with contemporary writing. This edition unearths some fascinating new material about the life and work of one of Wales's greatest 20th-century poets, R. S. Thomas, and compares his style to that of his Irish contemporary Samuel Beckett. Also included are essays on horror fiction and contemporary crime writing as well as a detailed analysis of Malcolm Pryce's detective fiction and an elegant exploration of the ways in which novelist Emyr Humphreys represents "old age." To complete this compilation is an indispensable annual bibliography of criticism in the field, continuing a longstanding tradition of providing readers with a range of thought-provoking and illuminating material.

Twentieth-Century Women's Writing in Wales documents Welsh women's writing in both Welsh and English in the twentieth century. It identifies a distinctive female literary tradition in which Wales is represented as a 'different country' by its modern women writers; a country in which both Welshness and womanhood are variously lived and performed. This volume is arranged chronologically and deals with a wide range of literary genres, including the short story; the novel; poetry; autobiography, travel writing and drama. It affords long-overdue serious critical attention to the works of early twentieth-century women writers - from the comical short stories of Jane Ann Jones to the powerful naturalist novels of Elena Puw Morgan and free-thinking 'New Woman' Bertha Thomas - while also dealing with better-known literary figures such as Kate Roberts and Gillian Clarke. This pioneering study of twentieth-century writing by Welsh women provides a much-needed alternative literary history to the stereotypical land of male bards.

This book may be considered as the second stage in the crucial campaign to raise the profile of Welsh writing in English both within Wales and in the wider world. The first stage was the foundation of the Library of Wales series, which was strongly advocated by all academics in the field of Welsh writing in English. Now that these largely forgotten works have been republished, it is possible for us to use them for teaching purposes in universities. We are left with the problem that critical material on these texts is scarce and, in some cases, non-existent. There is a demonstrable need on the part of undergraduate and postgraduate students for a critical book focusing specifically on a range of Library of Wales titles which will both introduce them to the field of twentieth-century Welsh fiction in English and demonstrate the varying critical approaches that can be used to analyse these texts. The book is a multi-authored work with its origins in the Association for Welsh Writing in English, which will include essays by both established leaders in the field, such as Professors Knight, Thomas, and Brown, and new, cutting-edge research by young scholars at the outset of their academic careers, such as Morse, Wainwright, and Hendon.