Module Identifier EN33920  
Module Title THE RISE OF WELSH WRITING IN ENGLISH  
Academic Year 2003/2004  
Co-ordinator Dr Damian Walford Davies  
Semester Semester 2  
Course delivery Seminars / Tutorials   20 Hours Seminar. (10 x 2 hour seminars)  
Assessment
Assessment TypeAssessment Length/DetailsProportion
Semester Assessment Continuous Assessment: 2 x 2,500 word essays  100%
Supplementary Assessment Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. 

Learning outcomes

At the end of the module, students will be able to:

- Locate and discuss Welsh Writing in English in its cultural and historical context
- Assess the influence of linguistic, economic, social and political factors on literary texts
- Examine the tensions inherent in the cultural programme of Welsh Writing in English
- Examine the way in which these texts interrogate issues of class, gender and national/ linguistic identity
- Write about literary texts in a critically-focused and well-structured manner

Brief description

How does a 'new' literature, or a literature in a new language, establish itself side by side with an ancient literary culture? What are the social and economic circumstances of its rise? How do its writers handle their relationship with that older literature with which they must co-exist - and what is their attitude to the dominant culture across the Border, with which they share a common language but not a common history? What tensions arise from class and gender difference, from the impact of the two World Wars, and from the divided loyalties of a newly bilingual nation? In trying to answer these and related questions, this option aims to illustrate a given community and its consciousness of itself at a crucial point in its development.

Content

The module will be taught by means of weekly two-hour seminars. Students are expected to purchase the five texts - by Caradoc Evans, Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones, Hilda Vaughan and Emyr Humphreys - for which editions are designated (by an *) in the following programme.

Programme
1. A Culture in Transition (3 seminars)
i) Introduction: 'The Anglo-Welsh Ideology'
Texts: selected critical material
ii) Rural Revolt
Text: Caradoc Evans, My People, ed John Harris (Seren, 1997)
iii) Industrial Revolt
Text: Idris Davies, Gwalia Deserta and The Angry Summer

2. Imagined Communities (3 seminars)
i) Myth and War
Texts: selections from Alun Lewis's writings
ii) Green and Nogood Boyos
Text: Dylan Thomas, Selected Poems, ed. Walford Davies (Penguin, 2000)*
iii) Community and Loss
Text: Glyn Jones, The Island of Apples, ed. Belinda Humfrey (University of Wales Press)*

3. Nation and Gender (2 seminars)
i) A Passive Resistance
Text: Hilda Vaughan, A Thing of Nought in A View Across the Valley: Short Stories by Women from Wales 1800-1950 ed. Jane Aaron (Honno Press)*
ii) Forging a Female Identity
Texts: selected short stories and poems by Dorothy Edwards, Margiad Evans, Lynette Roberts and Gillian Clarke

4. Language Conflicts (2 seminars)
i) Bilingual Identities
Text: Emyr Humphreys, A Toy Epic, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Seren Press)*
ii) 'Border Blues'
Texts by R S Thomas

Selected Bibliography
Sam Adams, ed., Seeing Wales Whole: Essays on the Literature of Wales (University of Wales Press 1998)
Anthony Conran, The Cost of Strangeness: Essays on the English Poets of Wales (Gomer Press 1982)
Anthony Conran, Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (University of Wales Press 1997)
Tony Curtis, ed. Wales The Imagined Nation: Essays in Cultural and National Identity (Poetry Wales Press 1986)
Raymond Garlick, An Introduction to Anglo-Welsh Literature (University of Wales Press 1970)
Jeremy Hooker, The Presence of the Past: Essays on Modern British and American Poetry (Poetry Wales Press 1987)
I. Hume and W.T.R. Pryce, eds. The Welsh and their Country (Gomer Press 1986)
Belinda Humfrey, ed. Fire Green as Grass: Studies of the Creative Impulse in Anglo-Welsh Poetry and Short Stories of the Twentieth Century (Gomer Press 1995)
Glyn Jones, The Dragon Has Two Tongues (Dent 1968)
Roland Mathias, Anglo-Welsh Literature (Poetry Wales Press 1987)
Roland Mathias, A Ride Through the Woods: Essays on Anglo-Welsh Literature (Poetry Wales Press 1985)
Kenneth O Morgan, Rebirth of a Nation: Wales 1880-1980 (Clarendon Press and University of Wales Press 1981)
M Wynn Thomas, Internal Difference: Literature in Twentieth-Century Wales (University of Wales Press 1992)
M Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures (University of Wales Press 1999)
Ned Thomas, The Welsh Extremist: A Culture in Crisis (Y Lolfa, new edn., 1991)
Gwyn Alf Williams, When Was Wales? (Penguin 1985)

Notes

This module is at CQFW Level 6