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Author: Emyr Humphreys
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 232
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Emyr Humphreys, poet, novelist, short-story writer and dramatist, is one of the foremost literary figures in Wales. For over 40 years he has interpreted the world of Welsh-speaking Wales, sympathetically but without sentiment.
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2018-09-01
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 1786832976
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2019, this is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of the life and work (excluding only work for television) of the major Welsh writer Emyr Humphreys. During the course of a career spanning half a century, and dating back to the 1950s when he collaborated with the likes of Graham Greene, Patrick Heron, Saunders Lewis, Richard Burton, Siân Phillips and Peter O’Toole, Humphreys has published some two dozen works of fiction (including Outside the House of Baal, the greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature) as well as highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. In addition to offering a critical and interpretative survey of this remarkable, distinguished body of work, the present volume also sets Humphreys’s output in the context of the dramatic, transformative decades in recent Welsh history during which it was produced.
Author: Emyr Humphreys
Publisher:
Published: 2000
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780708316269
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The 5th in a series, this work conveys the conflicts and passions of a small group of individuals in Wales, weighing them against the turmoil caused by war and its effects on a significantly changing Britain.
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2017-05-05
Total Pages: 301
ISBN-13: 1786830906
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2009-10-15
Total Pages: 386
ISBN-13: 0708323421
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.
Author: Emyr Humphreys
Publisher: Seren
Published: 2014-10-15
Total Pages: 277
ISBN-13: 1781722242
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A Toy Epic is the story of three boys moving towards the threshold of adult life in the 1930s. From differing backgrounds their lives cross and touch until they become firm friends. Each of them, Michael, Albie and Iorwerth, take up the story in turn, creating their own particular world and contriubting to the composite picture of life in 'one of the four corners of Wales'. Significantly, A Toy Epic is Wales' most important war novel, the dominant central theme of the book. It is framed by the two World Wars, and their shadows, one gone and one looming, colour the novel dark. War is the ultimate representation in the book of a dilemma: that war, although a threat to the existence of civilisation, can also advance it. A Toy Epic is Wales' shining example of modernism. Humphreys, in this book at least, is a modernist in the exact sense of the word. He experiments with form (in the footsteps of Woolf - in particular The Waves which folds an avuncular arm around A Toy Epic from beginning to end), but also he is conducting these experiments at the fault lines of fear and exaltation that the early part of the twentieth century inspired in its artists. A Toy Epic is a marvellous example of modernist techniques employed to condense the reading experience whilst opening up the riches of the prose's potential. It is also a very moving story of three boys growing up, about childhood, and Welsh childhood specifically, between the wars; it is about church versus chapel, about class, about different types of masculine identity, about prospects, about sex, marriage and about death. As M. Wynn Thomas points out in his full and excellent introduction to this edition, the boys represent the polarities at work in Wales during the time; the anglicanisation of Wales from without and within, the erosion of tradition, the significant internal migrations to the coast. Seldom has the country been so tellingly portrayed.
Author: Emyr Humphreys
Publisher: Seren Books
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In Emyr Humphreys' classic novel J.T. Miles reflects on a life of mis-steps, over-ambition and betrayal. He contemplates the modern world (of which he feels no part), his attempts to bring about social change and his inability to pass on love. It has been a life of drama and defeat; a life mirroring the fate of his country in the twentieth century. New Edition.
Author: Emyr Humphreys
Publisher:
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Conversations and Reflections brings together the previously uncollected ‘occasional writings’ of Emyr Humphreys, the major novelist of twentieth-century Wales. It maps the historical and cultural background to the work of a writer who was described by R. S. Thomas as ‘the supreme interpreter of Welsh life in English’. This selection of the most important essays published by Emyr Humphreys over a fifty-year period reveals the commanding range of his interests and confirms his stature as Wales's leading man of letters. Dealing with themes ranging from sixth-century literature to the twentieth-century media, these essays address the cultural commitments from which Emyr Humphreys’ creative writing takes its bearings, as well as being a major author’s statements on ‘his’ Wales, past and present. The essays are interwoven with a parallel series of discussions, conducted with M. Wynn Thomas, which explore many of the key personal, political and cultural concerns that have recurred throughout Emyr Humphreys’ work. Conversations and Reflections provides a fascinating overview of the work of one of Wales’ most significant creative writers and cultural activists.
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2018-09-01
Total Pages: 192
ISBN-13: 1786832976
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Published to mark the centenary of his birth in 2019, this is the first comprehensive and authoritative study of the life and work (excluding only work for television) of the major Welsh writer Emyr Humphreys. During the course of a career spanning half a century, and dating back to the 1950s when he collaborated with the likes of Graham Greene, Patrick Heron, Saunders Lewis, Richard Burton, Siân Phillips and Peter O’Toole, Humphreys has published some two dozen works of fiction (including Outside the House of Baal, the greatest novel of anglophone Welsh literature) as well as highly distinctive poetry, seminal essays, and a visionary cultural history of Wales. In addition to offering a critical and interpretative survey of this remarkable, distinguished body of work, the present volume also sets Humphreys’s output in the context of the dramatic, transformative decades in recent Welsh history during which it was produced.
Author: M. Wynn Thomas
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Published: 2021-09-15
Total Pages: 130
ISBN-13: 1786837684
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Down the centuries, poets have provided Wales with a window onto its own distinctive world. This book gives a sense of the view seen through that special window in twelve illustrated poems, each bringing very different periods and aspects of the Welsh past into focus. Together, they give the flavour of a poetic tradition, both ancient and modern, in the Welsh language and in English, that is internationally renowned for its distinction and continuing vibrancy.
