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Emyr Humphreys

Author: M. Wynn Thomas

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2018-09-01

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1786832976

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.

Collected Poems

Author: Emyr Humphreys

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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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.

Open Secrets

Author: Emyr Humphreys

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780708316269

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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.

Outside the House of Baal

Author: Emyr Humphreys

Publisher: Seren Books

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13:

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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.

Conversations and Reflections

Author: Emyr Humphreys

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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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.

The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys

Author: Linden Peach

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2011-01-15

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 0708324045

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For over half a century, Emyr Humphreys's work as a novelist, short story writer, poet, dramatist and television producer has been extraordinarily impressive. This pioneering and stimulating book considers Humphreys's fiction from a range of contemporary critical perspectives and stresses its relevance to the 21st century. Drawing on the work of leading modern cultural and literary theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Homi Bhabha, psychoanalytic critics such as Melanie Klein and Jacqueline Rose, and gender theorists such as Judith Butler, Linden Peach brings fresh perspectives to the content, structure and developing nature of Humphreys's work, employing, for example, historicist, post-historicist, new geography, psychoanalytic and feminist and postfeminist frameworks. Through detailed readings which highlight subjects such as gender identity, contested masculinities, war, pacifism, strangeness and 'otherness', problematic father and daughter relationships, and cultural discourse in complex linguistic environments, Peach suggests that Humphreys's work is best understood as 'dramatic', 'dissident' and/or 'dilemma' fiction rather than by the term 'Protestant novelist' which Humphreys used to describe himself at the outset of his career. Stressing how Humphreys came to see himself as more of a 'protesting' novelist, Peach examines how the dilemmas around which his fiction is based, originally linked to Humphreys's definition of himself as a 'protestant' writer, increasingly become sites in which controversial, and often dark themes, are explored. This approach to Humphreys's work is pursued through exciting readings of some of Humphreys best and lesser known works including A Man's Estate, A Toy Epic, Outside the House of Baal, the Best of Friends, salt of the Earth, Unconditional Surrender, The Gift of a Daughter, Natives, Ghosts and Strangers, Old people are a Problem, The shop and The Woman at the Window.

In the Shadow of the Pulpit

Author: M. Wynn Thomas

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2009-10-15

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0708323421

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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.

A Toy Epic

Author: Emyr Humphreys

Publisher: Seren

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1781722242

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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.

Emyr Humphreys

Author: M. Wynn Thomas

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2018-09-01

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1786832984

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Beowulf's Popular Afterlife in Literature, Comic Books, and Film

Author: Kathleen Forni

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0429880367

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Beowulf's presence on the popular cultural radar has increased in the past two decades, coincident with cultural crisis and change. Why? By way of a fusion of cultural studies, adaptation theory, and monster theory, Beowulf's Popular Afterlife examines a wide range of Anglo-American retellings and appropriations found in literary texts, comic books, and film. The most remarkable feature of popular adaptations of the poem is that its monsters, frequently victims of organized militarism, male aggression, or social injustice, are provided with strong motives for their retaliatory brutality. Popular adaptations invert the heroic ideology of the poem, and monsters are not only created by powerful men but are projections of their own pathological behavior. At the same time there is no question that the monsters created by human malfeasance must be eradicated.