Welsh Environments in Contemporary Poetry


Book Description

This book analyses how contemporary Welsh poetry, in both Welsh and English, constructs Wales as both human and physical space, within the context of 'ecocriticism', a literary critical practice that emerges out of environmentalist concern. It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies.




Post-Romantic Aesthetics in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry


Book Description

This book demonstrates the legacies of Romanticism which animate the poetry and poetics of Eavan Boland, Gillian Clarke, John Burnside, and Kathleen Jamie. It argues that the English Romantic tradition serves as a source of inspiration and critical contention for these Irish, Welsh, and Scottish poets, and it relates this engagement to wider concerns with gender, nation, and nature which have shaped contemporary poetry in Britain and Ireland. Covering a substantial number of works from the 1980s to the 2010s, the book discusses how Boland and Clarke, as women poets from the Republic of Ireland and Wales, react to a male-dominated and Anglocentric lyric tradition and thus rework notions of the Romantic. It examines how Burnside and Jamie challenge, adopt, and revise Romantic aesthetics of nature and environment. The book is the first in-depth study to read Boland, Clarke, Burnside, and Jamie as post-Romantics. By disentangling the aesthetic and critical conceptions of Romanticism which inform their inheritance, it develops an innovative approach to the understanding of contemporary poetry and literary influence.




Poetry & Geography


Book Description

Drawing on the recent focus on spatial imagination in the humanities and social sciences, Poetry and Geography looks at the significance of space, place, and landscape in the works of British and Irish poets, offering interpretations of poems by Roy Fisher, R. S. Thomas, John Burnside, Thomas Kinsella, Jo Shapcott, and many others. Its fourteen essays collectively sketch a series of intersections between language and location, form and environment, and sound and space, exploring poetry's unique capacity to invigorate and expand our spatial vocabularies and the many relationships we have with the world around us.




Ruth Bidgood


Book Description

This is the first full-length scholarly study of the prize-winning poet Ruth Bidgood, a writer who is best known for her long-term literary engagement with the landscape and communities of the mid-Wales region she has made her home.




Poetry, Geography, Gender


Book Description

Poetry, Geography, Gender explores literary and geographical analysis, cultural criticism and gender politics in the work of such well-known literary figures as Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Christine Evans and Gillian Clarke, alongside newer names like Zoë Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Drawing on her unpublished interviews with many of the featured poets, Alice Entwistle examines how and why their various senses of affiliation with a shared cultural hinterland should encourage us to rethink the relationship between nation, identity and literary aesthetics in post-devolution Wales. This series of lively and detailed close readings reveals how writers use the textual terrain of the poem, both literally and metaphorically, to register and script aesthetic as well as geo-political and cultural-historical change. As an innovative critical study, this volume thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first-century Wales.




The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Ecofeminism and Literature explores the interplay between the domination of nature and the oppression of women, as well as liberatory alternatives, bringing together essays from leading academics in the field to facilitate cutting-edge critical readings of literature. Covering the main theoretical approaches and key literary genres of the area, this volume includes: Examination of ecofeminism through the literatures of a diverse sampling of languages, including Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish; native speakers of Tamil, Vietnamese, Turkish, Slovene, and Icelandic Analysis of core issues and topics, offering innovative approaches to interpreting literature, including: activism, animal studies, cultural studies, disability, gender essentialism, hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, material ecocriticism, postcolonialism, posthumanism, postmodernism, race, and sentimental ecology Surveys key periods and genres of ecofeminism and literary criticism, including chapters on Gothic, Romantic, and Victorian literatures, children and young adult literature, mystery, and detective fictions, including interconnected genres of climate fiction, science fiction, and fantasy, and distinctive perspectives provided by travel writing, autobiography, and poetry This collection explores how each of ecofeminism’s core concerns can foster a more emancipatory literary theory and criticism, now and in the future. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of literature, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.




Cartographies of Culture


Book Description

This pioneering study offers dynamic new answers to Christian Jacob's question: 'What are the links that bind the map to writing?'




The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature


Book Description

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.




Welsh Periodicals in English 1882-2012


Book Description

This is the first book about Welsh periodicals in English to show how they have helped the development of Welsh writers and have provoked debate about key cultural and political issues in Wales.




Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture


Book Description

This pioneering study introduces readers to key themes from animal studies, as a frame within which it examines the representation of animals and animality in the work of a range of authors. In this new approach to animal studies, the concept of a relational universe that has emerged in recent natural and physical science is argued as being central. With fresh readings of Welsh literary and non-literary publications, including the Welsh press and Welsh-language manuals, the book explores relationships among animals and between humans and animals, to approach subjects such as intelligence, sensibility and knowledge from an animal perspective. The possibility of redrawing and reclaiming a history of rural and industrial Wales is suggested according to an animal history and agenda. This innovative contribution to Welsh and animal studies illuminates fascinating and controversial subjects, including animal domestication, captivity, communication, biopsychology, human exceptionalism, zoos and farming.