NORTH AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF WELSH CULTURE AND HISTORY
CYMDEITHAS GOGLEDD AMERICA AR GYFER ASTUDIO HANES A DIWYLLIANT CYMRU
BIENNIAL CONFERENCE /CYNHADLEDD DDWYFLYNYDDOL
NAASWCH 2016
20-22 July/ Gorffennaf 2016
ABSTRACTS
CRYNODEBAU
CONFERENCE SPONSORS / NODDWYR:
The Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
Yr Adran Geltaidd, Prifysgol Harvard
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
1
Welsh Airs and Triple Harps: The Musical Life of a Celtic Renaissance Circle
Dr Helen Barlow, Open University of Wales
‘It is gratifying to find ladies turning their minds to Welsh literature and Welsh music.’ So wrote Tegid
(the scholar John Jones) in a letter to the editors of the journal Archaeologia Cambrensis in March 1846.
It was to be hoped, he continued, that this flowering of female scholarship and patronage would ‘be the
happy means of rekindling Welsh nationality, and also of reviving Welsh literature and Welsh music,
which have been allowed to remain too long dormant, not to say despised and neglected.’
And he had a point. The late 18th and early 19th centuries saw a quickening of interest in the cultures of
Wales, Scotland and Ireland which historians often refer to as the ‘Celtic Renaissance’, and in Wales at
least, a number of remarkable women were at its heart. Tegid was of course a close collaborator of
Charlotte Guest, and not surprisingly he considers her ‘foremost in the rank as a Welsh scholar’. But also
prominent in his mind was Maria Jane Williams (‘Miss Jane Williams of Aberpergwm’), whose collection
of Welsh traditional song, Ancient National Airs of Gwent and Morganwg, he cites in his letter as a prime
example of the scholarship he applauded. A much-admired amateur singer as well as a scholar and song
collector, Maria Jane Williams was one of a close-knit group of women whose cultural life during the
1830s, 40s and 50s, focused very largely on Llanofer Hall in Monmouthshire and its galvanising spirit,
Lady Llanover, and on the cultural society Y Cymreigyddion Y Fenni to which they all belonged. It was at
the 1837 Abergavenny eisteddfod that Lady Greenly, one of the founder members of Y Cymreigyddion Y
Fenni, sponsored a prize for the best collection of original Welsh airs. The prize was won by Maria Jane
Williams with the collection which, under the determined guidance of Lady Llanover, was published as
Ancient National Airs, and which still holds its place among the most significant collections of Welsh
traditional song.
This paper focuses on the musical activity that engaged these women and their circle. Using their
correspondence and diaries, it considers what Welsh traditional music meant to them and why they
considered it so important to preserve it and to have it played and sung by Welsh performers.
Nesta’s Scream: Representations of Working-Class Women in Raymond Williams’s Loyalties
Cath Beard, Swansea University
I will be discussing the interrelations between two works, Raymond Williams’ Loyalties, published in
1985, and Beatrix Campbell’s Wigan Pier Revisited, published in 1984. In analysing the relationship
between Williams’ representations of working class women in the form of Nesta Pritchard, and
Campbell’s investigations into the situation of working class women in the early Thatcher years, we can
reread passages of ‘silence’ in Loyalties, and attempt to give voice to the inarticulacies of Nesta’s
experience.
My Hero: National Identity and Discourses of Torchwood
Melissa Beattie
Telefantasy series Torchwood (2006-2011, multiple production partners) was industrially and
paratextually positioned as being Welsh, despite its frequent status as an international co-production.
When, for series four, the production (and diegesis) moved primarily to the US as a co-production
between BBC Worldwide and American premium cable broadcaster Starz, fan response was negative
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
2
from the announcement, with the series being termed 'Americanised' in popular and academic
discourse. This study interrogates all of these assumptions via textual, industrial/contextual and
audience analysis focusing upon ideological, aesthetic and interpretations of national identity
representation. It finds that, in part due to the competing public service and commercial ideologies of
the BBC, Torchwood was a glocalised text from the beginning, despite its positioning as Welsh, which
then became glocalised again in series four. That the series also expresses an ideology of identity that is
not only postmodern-- itself related to the commercial necessities of complex quality TV-- but
heteroglossic, it allows for a number of different readings, often diametrically opposed and often
expressing the contradictory historical and contemporary discourses associated with British and
American 'quality TV.' This study therefore examines these elements on both a macro- and micro-level,
including a case study comparing and contrasting two episodes, as well as qualitatively investigating the
various readings produced by audience members in the US, UK and Canada, as well as transnational fans
who are long-term residents of one of those nations. The study finds that the audience is pseudoreflexive when it comes to interpretation; though all express an awareness and acceptance that national
identity is constructed and fluid, they still express an underlying essentialism when discussing national
identity in the context of the series.
Welsh Mythology and the Contemporary Novel: The “Double Drive” in Seren Books’ New
Stories from the Mabinogion
Audrey Becker, Marygrove College, Detroit
“The double drive apparent in the mythical appropriation process,” writes Julie Sanders in Adaptation
and Appropriation, “...is a simultaneous invocation of the wondrous and the quotidian...” (66). This
“double drive” of appropriation pervades many of the re-tellings of Welsh mythology in the New Stories
from the Mabinogion series published by Seren Books, a Welsh independent publisher featuring Englishlanguage writing from Wales.
Released between 2009 and 2013, the ten novels in the series—each by a different author—re-imagine
Welsh myths by placing them (or displacing them, rather) into modern and future worlds: worlds which
range from contemporary Britain to post-feminist apocalypses to futuristic, speculative sci-fi. My paper
examines the uncanny effects of the temporal displacements of medieval narratives in the Seren Books’
series of contemporary novels. While individual narratives from the medieval Welsh texts known as the
Mabinogi have begun to appear in anthologies aimed at undergraduates and have therefore become
marginally more familiar, these texts have not been absorbed into popular culture to the same degree as
other mythological narratives (such as Greek and Egyptian mythology, which serve as the basis for Rick
Riordan’s two commercially-popular series Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Kane Chronicles).
Indeed, what makes the New Stories series particularly interesting for adaptation studies is that while
“adaptation and appropriation tend on the whole to operate within the parameters of an established
canon,” it is precisely the noncanonical status of the Welsh source texts that make these New Stories
robust cultural documents (Sanders 97).
Masculinity, Welshness and the Early Modern Duel
Lloyd Bowen
This paper examines two duels involving North Walian families which occurred in 1593 and 1610. The
discussion focuses on the manner in which ideas of Welshness, patriarchy and masculinity intersected in
these events. The duels offer important new insights into discourses of gentility and male honour within
their particularly Welsh iterations. The first duel between Owen Salusbury and his relative John, for
example, produced a series of Welsh language poems on the confrontation which discuss notions of
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
3
patriarchal leadership, honour and justifiable violence within this particularist milieu. The second duel
involving a Welshman, Edward Morgan, and an Englishman, John Egerton, provides a rather different
perspective. In this instance legal materials illustrate how the English protagonists in an extended feud
sought to present their opponent through a deviant form of masculinity particularly associated with the
Welsh – that of the hot-headed and impulsive individual who eschewed the restraint and self-control
associated with refined Renaissance gentlemen. These episodes, then, offer fresh perspectives and new
evidence on the ways in which the honour culture of confrontational masculinity associated with the
duel was received among the early modern Welsh gentry, and also its complex relationship with broader
debates about the relative importance of assertiveness and restraint among local society’s leaders.
All else is Embellishment and Detail: The Conservative Party and the Significance of Social
Class in Post-War Welsh Politics
Sam Blaxland, Swansea University
In 1967, Peter Puzler wrote that British politics was driven by class distinctions, noting that ‘all else is
embellishment and detail’. Since then, many historians and political scientists have argued that whilst
class was once an important factor in deciding political allegiances, its significance weakened
considerably throughout the post-war period up until the end of the twentieth century. This paper seeks
to rehabilitate, to a large extent, Puzler’s notion that class formed the basis of British party politics by
using the Conservative Party in Wales as a working example.
Wales is undeniably a nation where national identity was linked to a particular type of working class
sentiment, but this was not a uniform experience. I will argue that although voting habits and allegiances
were sometimes driven by ‘big’ political factors, many things about the Conservatives in Wales suggest
that social class was the firm driver behind people’s decision to join, stand for, or support the Party:
successful and unsuccessful parliamentary candidates were normally drawn from very particular social,
educational, and economic backgrounds; supporters who identified with the party openly sought to
climb the social ladder; the Conservative Clubs that actively supported the party were home to a more
‘respectable’ clientele than other similar ‘working men’s clubs’; and all social events and fundraising
activities conducted by the party ‘on the ground’ were done under the auspices of relative wealth, and
belonging to high society. In the years of austerity after the Second World War, it was only the
Conservative Party who would regularly throw cocktail parties in stately homes, or castles.
This paper will also suggest that the Conservative Party tried, and failed, to change economic structures
in a positive way in Wales in order to create what it thought would be a new swathe of ‘outward looking’
– and less working-class - people willing to vote for it.
The evidence for this paper comes not just from newspaper and archive research (including hitherto
unscrutinised secret policy reports and documents), but also from a series of over 50 oral interviews with
former Conservative supporters, members, parliamentary candidates, and politicians from Wales. They
have provided a wealth of new evidence about how Conservatives think and act.
This paper therefore seeks to challenge some of the stereotypes about the nature and make-up of the
electorate in Wales in in the post-War period. Whilst Labour Party politics dominated in certain areas of
Wales, in others the Conservative Party was the political means of expressing a very different kind of
outlook and world view.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
4
Sites of Struggle: Disability in Coalfields Literature
Dr Kirsti Bohata, Swansea University
Disability, as a ‘site of struggle’ (Mitchell and Snyder), is politicised in the social realist novels which
dominated working-class literature of the south Wales coalfield in the 1930s. This paper considers the
nature of this politicisation. How far is disability adopted by authors such as Lewis Jones, Jack Jones and
Gwyn Thomas, as a form of ‘narrative prosthesis’, which enables them to symbolise and critique wider
structures of oppression? Or does industrial literature draw attention to disability as ‘disadvantage and
restriction’ (Hall), thus prefiguring what would come to be known as the social model of disability as
exclusion. What, if anything, does disability as a site of struggle in coalfields literature contribute to our
contemporary understanding of disability, politics and literary representation?
‘Those Things for which Women are Created’: Otherness in the Diction of Elisabeth InglisJones
Jayne Bowden, University of South Wales
Elisabeth Inglis-Jones (1900–1994) was a prolific writer whose novels depicted life in rural Wales,
focusing in particular on the problematic roles of the women of the Welsh squirearchy. Her books, out
of print until 2015 but generally well received at original publication, ranged from historical fiction to
biography but all demonstrated a Gothic influence, in particular within gender and colonialism,
illustrating examples of ‘otherness’ in her fiction. Starved Fields (1929), Crumbling Pageant (1932), Pay
Thy Pleasure (1939) and Aunt Albinia (1948) all draw upon Gothic influence to illustrate the striking, but
somewhat foreboding, landscape of Wales and the otherness of its inhabitants. While the Gothic in many
of her novels is used to explore themes of colonialism in rural Ceredigion, where Inglis-Jones grew up, in
her work it is the landscape, great Gothic estates and their inhabitants that form a backdrop that adds a
further dark atmosphere to her novels. The mountains are personified as ‘impenetrable’ (23) lands that
surround and conspire to keep one female character a prisoner in the very home where she should
instead feel safe. Listless women and children are portrayed as savages and zombies amid grim, desolate
landscapes. Otherness is portrayed in gender roles, nation and spinsterhood, and this paper will also
explore how, at the height of the ‘superfluous women’ issue in the inter-war years, Inglis-Jones’ portrayal
of spinsterhood within the crumbling Anglo-Welsh squirearchy was transformed with each novel she
wrote.
The Eisteddfod in America
James P. Cassarino, Green Mountain College
With so many nationalities intermingling in the United States, it is not difficult to overlook the musical
contributions of the Welsh. Within the United States itself, Edward G. Hartmann’s Americans from Wales
has been widely viewed as the authoritative study of Welsh emigration to America. However, his
remarks on the musical and literary traditions of the Welsh-American community both historically and in
present day United States are cursory and inadequate. Indeed, in the annals of American music one may
find studies of the English, Scotch and Irish elements, but there is little discussion of the Welsh
contributions. This is surprising when one realizes that the Welsh constitute one of the most musical
national groups of the world, and that they have transplanted their most important musical institutions
to those parts of the world to which they have immigrated.
The eisteddfod and the gymanfa ganu were two of the institutions that the Welsh imported to America.
The eisteddfod, in particular, maintained cultural value because of its dedication to singing and literary
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
5
activities. These constantly recurring festivals served to keep alive the spirit of patriotism and love of
mother country. Most importantly, they led the Welsh to cultivate their language through scholarship
and intellectual advancement.
The eisteddfod was first introduced in the United States during the Welsh immigration of the 1830s. The
competitions were usually based on religious themes such as hymn singing, the reading and recitation of
psalms or biblical texts, and the singing of anthems. In due course, the chief interest of the WelshAmerican eisteddfod centered primarily with music. A possible reason for this may have been due to the
lack of competent and qualified bards in the United States. In fact, the short lived National Eisteddfod of
America (1927-1940) predominantly included only music activities and little competition using the Welsh
language.
Despite the ‘Americanization’ of the eisteddfod in America, the Welsh community worked hard to keep
the eisteddfod alive and relevant. Several large scale eisteddfodau – such as the Chicago World’s Fair
Eisteddfod (1893), Pan American Exposition Eisteddfod (1901), Pittsburgh International Eisteddfod
(1913) and the International Exposition Eisteddfod in San Francisco (1915) – called national and
international attention to the Welsh in America, not only for celebrating its culture and unique musical
tradition, but in displaying their abilities as organizers and promoters.
Since its arrival in America, the Welsh community has established itself as a significant, historic society.
The present study draws on many sources to illuminate the introduction and production of Welsh
musical culture and traditions in the United States. It should not only attract interest among music
scholars in Wales itself, but also raise the profile of an under-appreciated ethnic contribution among
historians in America.
Pious and Loyal: Welsh-Language Elegy by Women
Cathryn A. Charnell-White, Aberystwyth University
Elegies form a statistically high percentage of women's Welsh-language poetry between 1400 and 1800,
ranging from mother's laments for their children, to elegy for close relatives and public figures such as
local gentry, poets, schoolteachers and curiosities (such as the fasting girl, Gaenor Hughes).
In a nation whose Crown Loyalists are more numerous and visible than its political radicals, the Welsh
elegies by women, unlike those by their counterparts in Ireland and Jacobite Scotland, have no overtly
political agenda beyond the 'bardic' function of the poet.
Welsh-language elegy by women is essentially local, and domestic or providential in outlook. This paper
considers the national/bardic and domestic dynamics of Welsh women's elegy in the broader context of
authorial voice and authority.
Roy Jenkins, the Tolerant tradition and the campaign for Racial Equality
Marc David Collinson
Between 1964 and 1979, every Labour Home Secretary either sat for a Welsh Seat, or was Welsh by
birth. Several more Welsh MPs also served in junior capacities at the Home Office. Whilst it would be
simplistic to suggest that this coincidence had an effect on the management and culture of a
predominantly Oxbridge-educated, London based institution, one could argue that policy initiatives
pursued by a Welsh-born minister could have been influenced by their background.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
6
When asked to name a famous Welsh politician, most would turn to one of the two great orators, David
Lloyd George or Aneurin Bevan. Yet Roy Jenkins, a native of Pontypool and son of Monmouthshire
miners leader Arthur Jenkins, was Home Secretary twice, between 1965-67 and 1974-76, as well as
serving as a popular Chancellor between 1967 and 1970. His term in this office is still lauded as an era of
effective and progressive reform. Jenkins famously oversaw the passing of legislation on liberalising the
states attitude to abortion, theatre censorship and homosexuality. However, what is often forgotten is
the important role he played in making the Race Relations (Amendment) Act, 1968 a reality.
In his lecture about Jenkins in Parliament, Andrew Adonis has argued that his tenure was exemplar of the
‘transformational minister’. This claim, however, is based on Jenkins’ support for wider, equally
progressive legislation to create a ‘civilised’ society, and does not pay attention to his attempts at
reforming Race Relations apparatus. Before his intervention, the Race Relations Act (1965) had been
passed as a mere palliative, doing little to alleviate racial discrimination that had permeated some
sections of British society. It was Jenkins who had the defining impact on the development of this
liberalising legislation. His parliamentary and public intervention, promoting the improving race relations
legislation in the mid-1960s did more for the cause than the myriad of metropolitan liberal campaign
groups active in the field. Jenkins was a trailblazer in the development of post-war integration.
In a speech widely described as his best, Jenkins argued that integration relied on equal opportunity,
cultural diversity and mutual tolerance. He was critical of attempts to disparage the purity of an existing
little Englander mentality, arguing ‘If it were to happen to the rest of us, to the Welsh (like myself), to the
Scots, to the Irish, to the Jews, to the mid-European, and to still more recent arrivals, it would be little
short of a national disaster’. Jenkins rarely spoke of his Welshness within the political arena, so his
summoning of this oft suppressed identity over the issues of integration, multiculturalism and identity is
deserving of greater attention. Within the wider debates over Wales as a tolerant nation, the extent to
which this supposed tradition of religious and cultural tolerance influenced Jenkins in his thinking during
this period is important. This impact on race relations is undoubtedly a forgotten aspect of a full and
impactful career.
New Stories from The Mabinogion: Hybrid Identities and Parasitic Assimilation in Gwyneth
Lewis’s The Meat Tree
Bethan Coombs, University of South Wales
This paper examines the function of Welsh mythology in Gwyneth Lewis’s re-telling of the Fourth Branch
of The Mabinogi, Wales’s medieval myth cycle. Lewis’s novella was commissioned as a contribution to
Seren Press’s recent series, New Stories from The Mabinogion (2009 – 2013) and the paper will provide
an inaugural critical response to that series.
When Welsh women writers select Welsh myth, fairy tales and folklore as mediums through which to
comment on paradigms of gender and nationhood, those paradigms are doubly interrogated. They are
examined in the source material and they are woven into new narratives which explore the writer’s
contemporaneous experience of Welsh womanhood. Welsh women writers who actively choose to draw
on and recover Welsh myth are, in so doing, rejecting the veracity and prestige of Classical myths and
canonised fairy tales as exemplar narratives par excellence. Their choice may be an aspect of a deeper
interrogation of discourses of power which underpin all myth and fairy tales. I argue that Lewis’s
uncovering of latent themes within Welsh myth goes beyond the feminist strategy of rewriting
‘particular favoured or disliked figures’ (Purkiss 445). By writing The Meat Tree in a post-Devolution, early
twenty-first-century Wales, Lewis creates a Welsh science fiction/mythopoeic narrative that finds
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
7
parallel with other feminist genre fictions such as feminist dystopias. Jim Miller argues that such fictions
are ‘an imaginative site of experimentation where new notions of identity and community are under
construction’ (338).Within a science fiction mode, Lewis questions the veracity of Welsh myths as
monolithic narratives ‘to expose and disempower not merely these often repressive restrictive formulae
but, more important, their informing ideologies’ (Wisker 55). In this way she presents a complex
engagement with Welsh myth as a buried truth of Welsh culture.
Analysis of The Meat Tree reveals a thematic interest in borders, boundaries, liminalities and hybridities
which engages not only with the function of storytelling as means of interpreting the world, but engages
with the essence of mythic and poetic imagination. Lewis presents Welsh myth as the site upon which
the imagination, the conscious and preconscious awareness, technology and poetry metamorphose into
the next phase of humanity’s interaction with its myths. For Lewis, poetry and technology have never
separated: the one has always been no more than a variation of the other. Science and the imagination
form an ‘intelligence [that] is a web of filaments and filigrees’ (G. Lewis, Meat Tree 163) and are distant
cousins on the same family tree, ‘a tree, after all, whose branches are still bearing fruit and on which
new leaves can never feel lonely’ (G. Lewis, ‘Afterword’ 254). This unending cycle of immortality through
assimilation and evolution is perfectly envisaged in the metaphoric meat tree, a small and somewhat
insignificant element in the original tale.
Gwyneth Lewis reworks myth through presenting the tale of Blodeuwedd and Lleu from The Mabinogi as
something which attunes to humanity. For Lewis, Welsh myth is presented as a parasite which must alter
according to its host – the human imagination. Welsh myth is not a venerated repository of truth, rather,
it is a crucible, or a Cauldron of Rebirth which spews out re-animated narratives. Such metamorphosis,
symbolised by new flowerings of the meat tree, can be viewed as the sine qua non motif of The Meat
Tree. The endurance of Welsh myth depends upon its perpetual adaption. Lewis’s re-telling of The
Mabinogi, suggests that as Welsh women’s experiences have evolved, so too have their engagements
with Welsh myth and folklore: they are not only refocusing Welsh mythic pasts, but also writing Welsh
mythic futures.
‘Ni allaf ddianc rhag hon’: Returns Ties and Constraints in the Literatures of Wales
Catriona Coutts, Bangor University
At some point during the first half of the twentieth century T. H. Parry-Williams wrote the poem ‘Hon’
with its tormented image of Wales as a set of “crafangau” embedded in the speaker’s breast and its
resigned final line: “Duw a’m gwaredo, ni allaf ddianc rhag hon.” And it seems as though characters in
Welsh literature have been sounding the same cry throughout the twentieth century.
In this paper I claim that Welsh literature of the twentieth century, in both English and Welsh, is a
literature full of ‘trapped characters’. By ‘trapped characters’ I mean characters that are either unable to
leave their home area or who leave but are drawn back later; they are bound by seemingly unbreakable
bonds. These bonds appear to be formed by and to a variety of attachments: family and community,
religion, and the past being three of the strongest and most prevalent. I will demonstrate the strength
and prevalence of these three forces with brief examples from both Welsh and English language texts,
going into more detail with family, and then proceed to my main thesis – that all these forces - family
and community, religion, the past, - can be seen to represent Wales on some level and thus what the
characters are really unable to escape from is, in fact, Wales itself.
I further argue that this prevalence of ‘trapped characters’ is the result of Welsh nationalist discourse.
This discourse has been so strong and pervasive in Wales that it has shaped the identity of many Welsh
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
8
people and has thus become an integral part of them. This is reflected in the literature, and the literature
in turn becomes a means of continuing the discourse, whether the author consciously chooses to do so
or simply reflects unconsciously the influence the discourse has had on them. I also suggest that this to
be expected in a nation like Wales - one that is part of a larger state where a different culture dominates.
The need to struggle for survival has imbued Welsh nationalist discourse with a strength and,
particularly, an urgency which is perhaps not shared by the nationalist discourses of larger, more
established nations.
Rebels or Poodles? Legislative Voting in the National Assembly for Wales
Einion Dafydd, Cardiff University
The constitutional arrangements that underlie devolved governance in Wales and public opinion towards
the political parties that compete for representation within the devolved institutions are two issues that
have received sustained scholarly attention in the period since the advent of Welsh devolution in 1999.
Yet, the key issue of how those elected carry out the substantive task of representation within the
National Assembly for Wales remains virtually unstudied. This paper will be the first to examine how
Assembly Members carry out one of their primary duties as representatives: voting at legislative
divisions. Drawing on a new dataset of all 130,000 votes cast during the fourth term of the Assembly
(2011–16), the study identifies the cohesion levels of the Assembly’s legislative parties and shows how
often Assembly Members are willing to vote against their political parties. These findings are related to
the evidence currently available from other parliamentary chambers, including the Scottish Parliament,
the House of Commons, the US House of Representatives, and the European Parliament. Reflecting on
these findings, the paper considers how these new insights shapes scholarly understanding of legislative
politics in the Assembly, and of the relationship between Assembly Members and their parties and
between citizens and their elected representatives.
Cultural Contributionism? T. S. Eliot, David Jones, and Welsh Culture
Clare Davies, Swansea University
T.S. Eliot’s position as an influential modernist poet, critic and publisher is of course well established. His
role in the emerging field of Welsh Writing in English has received less attention. My paper will explore
the role T. S. Eliot played in the construction of an Anglo-Welsh literary space. I will first explore how
Eliot’s notion of the ‘satellite’ culture (from his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture) can be seen to
allow a space for Anglophone Welsh culture to develop, before going on to explore the implications of
this idea on his treatment of Anglo-Welsh writers. Taking his personal and professional relationship with
David Jones as a case study, I will examine whether Eliot’s concept of the satellite culture can be applied
to his promotion of Jones’s work. I will then explore the similarities and differences between Eliot and
Jones’s work with regards to ideas of ‘culture’, ‘Britishness’ and ‘Welshness’. I aim to reveal how thinking
about Eliot as a catalyst behind the emergence of Anglo-Welsh literature can offer new perspectives in
thinking about how canons are constructed, and broadening the parameters of research into the field of
Welsh Writing in English.
The National Gallery, Wales and War: the letters of Martin Davies, 1939-41
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
9
Andrew Edwards, Bangor University
At the onset of the Second World War in 1939, the National Gallery’s collection of paintings, some two
thousand in all, were evacuated from their home in Trafalgar Square to various locations in north and
mid Wales, in order to protect them from the anticipated Luftwaffe bombing of central London. Among
the venues selected for the preservation of the paintings were the University College of North Wales in
Bangor, the Manod slate quarry in Blaenau Ffestiniog, Caernarfon Castle, Penrhyn Castle, and the
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. The custodian charged with ensuring the safety and security of
this priceless collection of art (including works by Gainsborough, Botticelli, Bosch, Leonardo and Rubens),
was the National Gallery’s Deputy Keeper, Martin Davies. During his time in north Wales, Davies
maintained regular contact with his National Gallery superiors through weekly or twice-weekly reports
and letters that highlighted the numerous challenges involved in safeguarding the collection in his care.
As this paper suggests, this substantial collection of correspondence sheds important and illuminating
light on the social, economic and cultural impact of wartime conditions on a local community often illequipped to deal with its demands, and provides a valuable snapshot of centre-periphery relations
during the war.
The Welsh Imperial Fiction of Owen Rhoscomyl
John Ellis, University of Michigan-Flint
Although an influential and versatile pioneer of Welsh writing in English at the turn of the century, Owen
Rhoscomyl is an almost forgotten figure in the literary history of Wales. With its breathless tone of
soaring romance, Victorian style, and cardboard characterization, the limited literary merit of
Rhoscomyl's florid prose has often allowed his work to be dismissed or ignored. A staunch Welsh
nationalist as well as a monarchist and imperial patriot, Rhoscomyl's conservative and unorthodox
opinions have further estranged his work from the conventional narrative of Welsh history and
literature. Yet, Owen Rhoscomyl was a popular writer and well known public personality in Edwardian
Wales. Exploiting his colorful past as a cowboy in the American west and as an international mercenary
and war hero, he became a minor celebrity and a well known advocate of Welsh cultural nationalism.
Modeling himself after Sir Walter Scott, Rhoscomyl strove to create a heroic and inspirational past for
the Welsh nation through his historical romances, journalism and historical writing. Featuring gallant
Welsh characters, he also produced several short stories and three adventure novels of a semiautobiographical nature set in the American west, Patagonia and South Africa. Placing his literary
efforts with that of Allen Raines, contemporaries celebrated Rhoscomyl as pioneering a movement of
distinctly Welsh writing in English. His work also spoke to many in 'imperial Wales' whose nationalism
and imperialism were mutually compatible and supportive sentiments. This paper will explore themes of
imperialism and Welsh nationhood found in the fiction of Owen Rhoscomyl.
Real Gower – A Conversation between Texts
Jane Fraser, Swansea University
Background
2014 saw the untimely death of one of Wales’ greatest cultural figures: the poet, essayist, and
psychogeographer, Nigel Jenkins. Not only did Wales lose one of its greatest sons, but students at
Swansea University where Nigel was Director of Creative Writing, lost one of its finest teachers. As Fflur
Dafydd says: “He had changed their lives; he had changed their vision. And that is a true gift, and a real
legacy.”
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
10
One of those students was me. At the time of his death Nigel was setting me on my journey towards a
PhD, with a focus on the short story form and a sense of place. That place was Gower, a place Nigel
deemed perhaps ‘too beautiful for its own good’ which we both loved (and sometimes loathed) and
where we both lived: he in the south and me in its north-west corner.
At the time of his death, Nigel was also writing ‘Real Gower’ a psychogeography or deep-mapping of
Gower, as part of Seren’s real series.
Objectives
The proposed paper aims to focus solely on Nigel’s ‘Real Gower’ and show how my own work has
responded to it. A conversation between texts: between Nigel’s non-fiction and the development of my
fiction work.
Methodology
The paper will outline Seren’s ‘real’ methodology used by Nigel in relation to Gower and show how if
anyone could make it real, he could: delineating the area, walking it, getting to ‘know’ it again from the
ground up, through the soles of his feet, the pores of his skin, employing a uniquely humorous
Nigelesque method of observation, exploration and conversation with its inhabitants.
I am proud to say that I was one such inhabitant as well as his student, as together we ‘carved out’ the
section of the book on Llangennith for his pyschogeography; and, with Nigel as a tutelary spirit, I
continue to ‘carve out’ the Gower landscape in my fiction.
Results/Conclusions
With reference to selected text (80% from Nigel’s ‘Real Gower’ and 20% from my proposed short story
collection set in the Gower peninsula entitled, ‘The South-Westerlies’) I will illustrate in a twenty-minute
time frame, the conversation between texts and the legacy of Nigel’s teaching:
“A mighty powerful piece of writing, Jane – this is real Gower, or an aspect of real Gower, an un-flinching
honest and truthful slice of Gower life such as has never been written before. It’s an important piece of
writing…earthy and with a painful angularity.” Nigel Jenkins, 2013
‘Admiring the pugilistic art?’ Newspaper Reports on Boxing in Nineteenth Century South
Wales
Chris Gardiner, University of South Wales
Fig. 1. Prize-Fighting in Nineteenth Century Wales
Success unto Young Bloody,
Let every hearty sing,
He is the conquering hero
And the champion of the ring.
The above is an extract from an undated Welsh poem entitled ‘Young Bloody’ concerning prize-fighting
in Montgomeryshire. As with the Monmouthshire Merlin report from 1861 (fig.1), it not only described
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
11
the fight, but it is a memorial of the days when the community was both obliged and ready to provide its
own entertainment. During the nineteenth century the popularity of prize-fighting was also accompanied
by the development of sports writing. As leisure activities increased, sports news emerged as an integral
part of daily newspapers, and this included the reporting of prize-fighting. The vast number of reports on
regional and national prize-fights printed in newspapers in Wales during the nineteenth century indicates
that there was a continuing fascination with pugilism, though one that was at the same time extremely
equivocal, as people were both fascinated and repulsed by the brutality of the sport.
This illustrated paper will thereby demonstrate the importance of nineteenth century newspapers as the
main means for conveying details of prize-fighting. It will expose the harsh nature of the sport as well as
expectations of both the participants and the audience (‘the fancy’) during this period. Significantly, the
study will explore the transition of prize-fighting from a largely unstructured ‘entertainment’ into an
increasingly regulated sport in industrial Wales.
Macaronics: The Dragon's Two Tongues in Contemporary Literature
Katie Gramich, Cardiff University
In his satirical poem, ‘How to write Anglo-Welsh Poetry’, John Davies advised the would-be Anglo-Welsh
artiste to ‘spray place names around. Caernarfon./Cwmtwrch. Have, perhaps, a Swansea/Sun marooned
in Glamorgan’s troubled/Skies; even the weather’s Welsh, see.’ The poem implicitly acknowledges the
successful campaign of Cymdeithas yr Iaith in the 1970s, when English road signs were torn down or
amended with the liberal application of spray paint. For the Anglo-Welsh writers, though, only the
vestiges of Welsh remain, the place names, and even they had to be reclaimed from the cultural
imperialism of official renaming. The linguistic situation in Wales has changed dramatically since the ’70s,
though; ‘Anglo-Welsh’ poetry has been transformed into ‘Welsh writing in English’, many battles in
favour of the Welsh language have been won, we have our own, albeit limited, government, and the
once notoriously Anglicised capital, Cardiff, is now one of the places in Wales where Welsh is on the
increase. How has this shifting linguistic map been reflected in contemporary literature from Wales? The
work of Gwyneth Lewis is one of the best indicators of a growing awareness of bilingualism: Gwyneth
writes separate poems in both her native languages and talks of this as ‘a difficult domestic arrangement,
but it holds.’ At the same time, she has also written a number of deliberately hybrid linguistic texts,
deploying both languages often with a cunningly concealed political import. In the collection Keeping
Mum, for instance, there’s a poem entitled ‘What’s in a Name?’, a version of a Welsh-language poem in Y
Llofrudd Iaith called ‘Dechrau’r Anghofio’ which explores what it means to gradually forget a language.
Hidden in its light-hearted rhyming couplets is a cri-de-coeur about cultural impoverishment. And yet,
smuggling Welsh words into an English poem, as she does here, is one way of arresting that cultural
amnesia. More and more works of contemporary literature are reflecting a hybrid linguistic reality by
using a mixture of languages on the page; this is no longer a question of ‘code-switching’ but something
much more pervasive – it is as if a new ‘macaronic’ aesthetic is being invented. It is observable not only
in English texts but also in Welsh, such as some of the poems of Graham Davies and Emyr Lewis. In
contemporary novels, too, we witness inventive methods of rendering linguistic hybridity, such as in
Christopher Meredith’s The Book of Idiots which reveals, teasingly, three-quarters of the way through,
that the two main characters have actually been speaking Welsh all along. At a time when some
language campaigners are suggesting that a benign acceptance of bilingualism is going to be the death of
Welsh, let us ask whether this bilingualism in contemporary writing is actually reactionary or progressive.
Family Histories: Elegy in the Early Years of the Welsh American Journals
Melinda Gray
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
12
This presentation will focus on elegies and other commemorative poems published between 1840 and
about 1855 in Y Cenhadwr Americanaidd and Y Cyfaill o’r Hen Wlad yn America. These poems were
formally and thematically conventional, and yet they often delineated family ties and friendships that
were more often left out of the narrative biographies and autobiographies popular at this time. They
made a place on the page and in the historical record for people—children, women, laborers, and
migrants—whose lives otherwise might not have registered at all. The stories suggested by these
poems—or by series of poems published over a number of years—can offer unexpected insight into the
lives of forgotten authors and subjects. With particular reference to the early poems of Laura Griffiths
(1814-1864) and some mid-nineteenth century Boston and Cambridge connections.
“Kick[ing] against the system”: Queer(y)ing Masculinity, Stardom and “Welshness” in the
films of Richard Burton
Robin Griffiths, University of Gloucestershire
There has long been an enduring perception in popular discourse of an immutable incongruence
between ‘Welsh-ness’ and homosexuality that is due in part to persistent stereotypes of Wales as a
provincial, backwards-looking nation wherein “men are men – and the sheep are worried”. It is this
hetero-hegemonic form of essentialist Welsh masculinity that has similarly dominated images of Welsh
male identity and representation in Cinema that can, in many respects, be traced back to the “diabolical”
star personas of such iconic Welsh actors as legendary Hollywood “hellraiser” Richard Burton. However,
the ‘shocking’ revelation by controversial biographer Ellis Amburn that Burton was not, as his family
claimed, "the most heterosexual man most people had ever encountered”, but in fact secretly gay (BBC
News, 10th April 2000), for many merely validated the rumours that have persistently surrounded
Burton following his earlier revelation in a 1975 interview that he “was a homosexual once, but not for
long”. And so, in retrospect, the internal masculine crises that haunt the brooding, excessive and selfloathing Welsh machismo that permeates his performances (both textually and extra-textually) in such
queerly inflected films as Look Back in Anger (1958) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), or
the tellingly conflicted uneasiness of his roles in such problematic “sad gay stories” as Staircase (1969)
and Villain (1971), in particular, lend themselves quite readily to the subversive reimaginings of the
contemporary queer screen theorist.
This paper will, therefore, investigate the importance of these films – and the ‘queer legacy’ of Burton’s
life and work more broadly – not only in terms of their power to provoke and disrupt screen
representations of hetero-normative male identity, but more importantly, to determine how this
“quintessentially Welsh” framing of such themes and tensions between nationality, stardom and sexual
identity/crisis marks an important interventionist stage and establishes some productive new
parameters for further research in the nascent critical and conceptual development of a queer
historiography of Welsh cinema.
The National Museum of Wales: The Wartime Dismissal of Iorwerth Peate
Martin Hanks, Bangor University
Iorwerth Peate is best known as a co-founder (together with Cyril Fox) and curator of the National
Museum of Wales, National History Museum at St Fagans, near Cardiff. A post he fulfilled from 1948 to
1971. He was initially appointed by the Museum, to their Department of Archaeology in 1927 following a
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
13
short spell as a scholar at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. During this time Peate was a
committed Welsh Nationalist Party member and a pacifist.1
Following the arson attack at the construction site of R.A.F. Penrhos, the proposed RAF bombing school
in Penyberth, by three members of the Welsh Nationalist Party in 1936, Peate, while condemning the
establishment of the military base, objected to the use of these violent methods and resigned from the
party.2 This course of action indicates the depth of feeling Peate held against physical aggression of any
type.
By 1939 and the onset of the Second World War, Peate was employed by the National Museum of Wales
as Keeper of the Welsh Folk-Lore Department, however, unhappy by his pacifist beliefs and alleged
flouting of authority, Peate was dismissed from this position. This decision was universally criticised by
Welsh cultural and national organisations, but despite various petitions for his re-instatement, including
one from the Museum’s own Board of Governors, the decision stood.
Using the original disciplinary case file, including notes by its Chairman the Earl of Plymouth, which are
held at Bangor University Archives, together with the papers of Undeb Cymru Fydd who campaigned
vigorously for Peate’s re-instatement, backed by contemporary newspaper reports, this paper will
examine the case against Iorwerth Peate, highlight the key issues and decisions of the Museum and will
detail the pressure brought to bear during the period to have Peate re-instated to his previous position.
The Museum did eventually, following the intervention of the various Welsh Members of Parliament,
especially Anerin Bevan, re-employ Peate. But by this time several years had gone by and the war was
over.
Goronwy Owen: A Welsh Poet Exiled in Virginia
Proal Hartwell, Charlottesville, Virginia
Goronwy Owen (1723-1769) was a Welsh poet and priest who spent the last dozen years of his life in
Virginia (USA). As a poet, Owen is still revered in his native land as in his work he revived the ancient
bardic meters of Welsh poetry. He lived in obscurity in Virginia, first in Williamsburg where he was the
Master of the Grammar School at the College of William and Mary, and then in Brunswick County where
he was the rector of St. Andrew’s Parish. In Brunswick County, Owen wrote Marwnad Lewys Morys
Yswain, widely considered one of his greatest poems. The Marwnad is significant in that it incorporates
all 24 meters of ancient Welsh poetry.
In Goronwy Owen: A Welsh Poet Exiled in Virginia, I will chronicle Owen’s life in Virginia. I will first
examine his horrific voyage from England to Virginia during which his wife and youngest son died. I will
then look at his brief tenure in Williamsburg, which included the death of his second wife. Background
information on the College of William and Mary will be provided, and I will focus on the events that led
to Owen’s dismissal from this institution.
I propose to next trace the poet’s life in Brunswick County, Virginia. I will provide details of his third
marriage and his career as a parish priest. I will outline the composition of Marwnad Lewys Morys Yswain
and I will offer a brief glimpse of Owen’s relationship with the Morris family. I intend to chronicle the
circumstances of Owen’s death and the efforts over the years to identify the poet’s grave. I will conclude
1
Iorwerth Peate, Dictionary of Welsh Biography http://yba.llgc.org.uk/en/s6-PEAT-CYF-1901.html. Accessed 12 January 2016.
Saunders Lewis, D. J. Williams and Lewis Valentine, set fire to construction workers hut and a pile of wood at the initial stage of the
construction of the new R.A.F. base in protest at its location in the Welsh speaking region of north Wales. They then promptly turned
themselves in to the local Police Station and admitted their guilt. For more information see Dafydd Jenkins, The Nation on Trial: Penyberth 1936
(Cardiff, 1998).
2
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
14
my presentation with an assessment of the poet’s legacy in Virginia, including the story behind the
creation of a monument in the poet’s honor at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lawrenceville, Virginia.
If permitted, I will also present slides associated with Owen’s life in Virginia, featuring the shell of his
house which still stands in Brunswick County.
“It's Cool to be a Welsh person but that doesn't Necessarily Mean you Speak Welsh”:
Assessing Welsh Language Use Patterns in Six Welsh Communities
Rhian Siân Hodges, Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol, Prifysgol Bangor University
The 2011 Census points to a 20,000 decrease in the numbers of Welsh speakers since 2001. However,
the 2011 Census results show that the geographical language map of Wales is complex, and the
migration patterns behind the figures lead to various new opportunities and challenges for the Welsh
language and its speakers. The use of Welsh as a community language is at the epicentre of these
challenges as English often remains the dominant social language beyond the education system (Hodges
2009, 2012, 2014, Thomas and Roberts, 2011, Thomas, Lewis and Apoloni, 2014). A key strategic aim
according to the Welsh Government (2012:16) is to ‘strengthen the position of the Welsh language in the
community’ in order to normalise broader Welsh language practices. It is this particular aspect of
language planning that will be the focus of this research paper.
Bangor University was commissioned to undertake a research study on behalf of the Welsh Government
to attempt to understand how the Welsh language is used in specific communities in Wales. This
research hoped to assess whether particular programmes funded by the Welsh Government to promote
community Welsh language use are meeting the needs of those communities. Additionally, this study
analyses factors that influence language use including socio linguistic context, language skills and
attitudes towards language. It also gauges public opinion regarding the opportunities to use Welsh in
specific communities. This project was conducted in six localities throughout Wales, four of which had
been specifically targeted by the Welsh Government in their interventions to promote the use of the
Welsh language in the community. The other two communities had not been specifically targeted by
these interventions.
A total of 30 focus groups were conducted in order to gather opinions regarding the social opportunities
to use the Welsh language, respondents’ involvement with activities where the Welsh language is used,
any gaps in community activities and what they would like to see in their communities. The focus groups
were supplemented by over 600 street surveys that collected information about individuals’ language
use practices and the present and future opportunities to use the Welsh language in the community.
Key research findings from this study include the varied opportunities to use Welsh in differing language
communities and the key gaps in provision such as a lack of social activities for teenagers. Findings also
included the social norms of using English as a default language when interacting with shop assistants
and the lack of opportunities available to use Welsh when accessing public services such as the health
service. The research also reported the experience of Welsh language learners and their social Welsh
use. Furthermore, the research highlights the link between language use patterns established in the
education system and continued within social settings and the impact of such behaviour patterns upon
the vitality of the Welsh language. Findings will be contextualised within a broader minoritized language
framework.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
15
The Soldiers Return: Nigel Heseltine’s War-haunted Writings
Daniel Hughes, Bangor University
2016 marks both the centenary of Nigel Heseltine’s birth, and the seventieth anniversary of the
publication of his short story collection, Tales of the Squirearchy (1946), a grotesque, surrealist and
anarchically comedic collection which lampooned the anglicised landowning class Heseltine himself
belonged to through his father, the composer Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine). Despite this dual
anniversary, Nigel Heseltine remains a criminally neglected figure in studies of modern/ist Welsh and
British literature. Heseltine was part of a Welsh modernist formation, active through-out the nineteen
thirties and forties, which counted Dylan Thomas, Lynette Roberts & David Jones amongst its members.
Across a long and varied career, which encompassed not only Welsh writing (Heseltine edited the literary
periodical Wales in 1939), but also colonial administration and travel writing, Heseltine encountered
figures as disparate as Dylan Thomas, Idi Amin and John F. Kennedy. This paper will discuss a key aspect
of this much-neglected and multi-faceted author, namely the ways in which Heseltine’s writings (prose
and poetry) are haunted by war. Heseltine’s writing offers a domestic perspective unusual in a male warwriter, and maimed soldiers, war memorials and even spectral veterans pervade Heseltine’s fiction. For
instance, ‘The Life and the Burial’ features “a lame man trepanned from the war of ’14, and thrice
decorated.” This paper will continue and expand the nascent discussion begun recently by M Wynn
Thomas, Rhian Davies and Robert Gossedge, mark Heseltine’s dual anniversaries, and perhaps inspire
more scholars to research Heseltine’s writing; war-haunted or otherwise.
A Son of the Rhondda’s “Entrepreneurial Society” in the Deep South: the Life and Career of
William Herbert (1850-1933)
Robert Humphries
At the turn of the twentieth century, William Herbert was celebrated in Y Drych as “the most successful
coal manager” in Alabama, and was considered one of the pillars of a small but influential group of
Welsh-born industrial leaders in the American South. Beginning his career as a miner in the Rhondda
Valley, Herbert worked in the Ohio coal country before taking advantage of new opportunities amid the
South’s post-Reconstruction industrialization. Herbert settled near Birmingham, Alabama and spent the
remainder of his life as a respected member of the managerial class. Although at first glance the life of
William Herbert represents the archetypal immigrant success story of a self-made man achieving the
American dream through hard work and initiative, this paper examines that proposition in greater detail
and seeks to discern other factors that may have contributed to his success. Herbert’s diary from his
1886 return trip to Wales reveals he was acquainted with leaders of what Richard Griffiths has called the
“entrepreneurial society” of the Rhondda Valleys, including Idris Williams “Bryn Glas” and William
Abraham (Mabon). Even more compelling is his close friendship with Azariah Thomas, a relative by
marriage and the nephew of James “Siamps” Thomas, Porth’s wealthy, “self-made” industrialist. In the
United States, Herbert embraced both his native Welsh and adopted American identities with
enthusiasm, and lauded as a Welshman “pure of heart and language,” helped organize an eisteddfod in
Alabama. His pilgrimage to the site of Samuel Roberts’ homestead in Tennessee was reported in Y Drych.
Ultimately, his decision to advance his career in the South indicates Herbert had achieved considerable
prestige among Welsh Americans before his arrival in the Alabama coalfield; as Ronald Lewis has pointed
out, the controversial use of convict labor and the region’s racial politics deterred Welsh industrial
migrants from the South with the exception of managers and executives. This presentation summarizes
William Herbert’s career and migration trajectories, and suggests he benefited from a transatlantic
network of friends, relatives and influential figures rooted in the “entrepreneurial society” of South
Wales.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
16
‘Carols at Cockcrow: Indigenous Welsh Carols in Privately-Held Songbooks’
Rhiannon Ifans, University of Wales Trinity Saint David
The plygain carol service once held throughout Wales is now mainly restricted to four valleys in midWales. A key element in the tradition is the manuscript songbook from which the carollers perform.
Manuscript songbooks have never been made the subject of a sustained study, partly due to the secrecy
in which they are enshrined. Carol texts are always transmitted from paper not from memory, but the
analysis and preservation of plygain manuscript songbooks has always been problematic. This paper will
offer comment on individual plygain carols, and provide new information regarding these private
songbooks.
‘Taffy was a Welshman’: Welsh National Identity in English Broadside Ballads
Christine James, Swansea University
Extant broadside ballads of the seventeenth century contain a number of references to the Welsh, in
both words and images. They paint an aggregated portrait of a hot-headed people whose love of eating
toasted cheese, brandishing leeks and riding goats is matched only by their delight in swearing oaths and
reciting pedigrees, and their expertise in deceiving and thieving. This familiar caricature of the
unsophisticated and untrustworthy Welshman – usually presented in the context of cosmopolitan
London – has been afforded critical discussion by both the art historian Peter Lord (Words with Pictures:
Welsh Images and Images of Wales in the Popular Press 1640–1860, 1995), and the ballad critic Gerald
Porter (‘ “Who talks of my Nation?”: the Role of Wales, Scotland and Ireland in Constructing
“Englishness” ’, in Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia and Longing in Oral Cultures, eds. Luisa Del
Giudice and Gerald Porter, 2001).
This paper will summarise and reassess this English characterization of the Welsh before giving more
particular attention to the ballads’ representations of the Welshman’s speech and phonology – an area
identified by Gerald Porter as one deserving of further study. In doing so it will refer to what is possibly
the earliest example of printed Welsh, and certainly the earliest representation of Welsh speech in an
English-language text, in Andrew Borde’s, The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge.
Illustrating Welsh Broadside Ballads, 1620-1840
E. Wyn James, Cardiff University
To quote the art historian Peter Lord, ‘Printed pictures are almost as old as the printed word.’ It is
appropriate therefore that what is probably the earliest surviving Welsh-language broadside, printed in
London in about 1620, contains illustrations. However, in general, illustrations are fairly few and far
between in Welsh broadsides (and other Welsh-language publications) until one reaches the nineteenth
century.
The prolific printer from the Conwy valley in north Wales, John Jones (1786–1865), was an important
pioneer of illustrated broadside ballads. In addition to the smaller four-page ballad sheets, John Jones
was noted for his larger format broadsides, where the pictorial element is especially prominent. John
Jones was a member of the third of five generations of his family involved in printing and publishing, and
was unusual as a Welsh printer in that he built his own printing press and cast his own type.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
17
This paper, after giving a general overview of the illustrations to be found on broadsides in Wales down
to the nineteenth century, focuses especially on the illustrated broadsides printed by John Jones. It pays
special attention to Hugh Hughes and James Cope, the radically-minded illustrators he used, who were
heavily influenced by English engravers such as Thomas Bewick and James Catnach and by the radical
politics and nonconformist religion of the period.
‘In the Interest of the Progress and Development of the Country’: Professional Women in
Late Nineteenth Century Wales
Beth Jenkins, Cardiff University
During the late nineteenth century, a group of social campaigners sought to include the interests of girls
in the wider programme of Welsh educational reform. The campaigners upheld educated women as the
agents of a national ideal and, in doing so, rhetorically linked the educational progress of women to the
progress of the nation. While educationalists argued their case in terms of strengthening and improving
the role of women both in the home and in their contribution to society, they did not always view
women’s higher education as a platform for their entry into paid, professional employment. The paper
first explores this tension between support for women’s higher education and lack of support for
women’s entry into the professions. It then analyses how arguments for women’s admission to the
professions used similar notions of sexual difference to outline the unique contribution professional
women could make to the nation’s health, education and morality. The paper therefore reveals that
ideas of national identity, gender and social class were used to both limit and enhance women’s wider
role in the public and professional life of Wales.
Embodied Disability: Gender, Sexuality and Race
Alex Jones, Swansea University
Representations of disability in industrial literature indicate specific literary discourses of ‘ideal’, normal
or healthy masculinity and male bodily norms. In history and fiction, perceived bodily adaptations to
male working-class bodies are often the subject of comment, debate, or a voyeuristic gaze. Mining
narrow seams of coal could shorten and twist the stature of the boys and men, at the same time as
granting extraordinary strength and flexibility. The body’s occupational adaptations were sometimes
perceived as evolutionary (or degenerate) physical alterations, in which colliers were represented as a
subterranean breed apart intersecting with contemporary ideas of race and ethnicity. Whilst male
colliers faced an extraordinarily high risk of injury, disease and death, Dot Jones has shown that coalfields
women near the start of the 20th century were at greater risk of death than their male counterparts.
Both women and disabled people have historically occupied a marginalised position in scholarship of the
coalfields; disabled women doubly so. This paper will therefore consider the gendering of disability of
both men and women in the coalfields, and the way that this intersects with class, race and work.
The Turn of a Civilisation: Hywel Teifi Edwards, the National Pageant of Wales, 1909, and
Excluded Minorities
Anwen Jones, Aberystwyth University
In 2008, the Llandysul-based Gomer press published a tributary volume celebrating the renowned Welsh
historian, Hywel Teifi Edwards’s success in persuading his readers of, ‘the joy and thrill of studying their
nation’s literature and history and expanding their horizons’.3 Whilst the volume, Cawr i’w Genedl,4
3
Jones, Tegwyn & Walters, H, (eds.) Cawr i’w Genedl: Cyfrol i Gyfarch yr Athro Hywel Teifi Edwards, (Gomer: Llandysul, 2008), p. 11.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
18
made an unequivocal statement regarding Edwards’s national stature, it did not mark the end of his
contribution to Welsh life and literature. In the brief period between its publication in 2008, and his
death in 2010, he made another significant contribution to the study of Welsh culture, its history and its
relevance to contemporary Wales. His publication, in 2009, of a remarkable photographic and literary
tribute to the 1909 Cardiff National Pageant was his final flourish in terms of the project to which he had
dedicated the energy of a lifetime. The book is a radical examination of the contribution of ‘Rhwysg
Hanes Cymru,’5 to a modern Welsh nation–building project. Edwards presents this great national
spectacle as a key player in the cultivation of a collective memory, ignited and fuelled by, ‘a pantheon of
heroes, and the “lieux de mémoire” of a national mythology. ’6 It is quite clear, he argues, that Owen
Rhoscomyl, or Arthur Owen Vaughan, Deputy Pageant master and scriptwriter, considered it an,
‘important development in the psychological process of nation building’7. It is equally clear that Edwards
is at ease with such a discourse and that this book marks another contribution to his life-time
commitment to that creative, cultural process. Nonetheless, amidst the excitement and splendour of
Edwards’s account, the modern reader meets several difficulties. Tensions cluster around the Cardiff
National Pageant’s Imperialist overtones, its acceptance of a British framework for the evaluation and
expression of modern Welsh nationhood, its tendency to use the English language at the expense of
Welsh and the weakness of its historical foundations. With his customary confidence and flair, Edwards
meets these difficulties head on. However, at the close of his account, there remains one, persistent
stumbling block for the contemporary reader: the question of the integrity of the pageant as an art form
capable of addressing the challenges of twentieth century modernism, or, perhaps, even more
importantly, those of a twenty first century, post-devolution Wales. This paper offers an evaluation of
Edwards’s final, historic literary study of Welsh culture and society in the context of the argument
presented by the feminist critic, Susan Bennett in, Women, Theatre and Performance, New Histories,
New Historiographies. In this turn of the millennium publication, Bennett argues that:
“One of the most thorough and radical changes in drama studies since the early 1980s has been
the orientation and reorganisation of dramatic, and more generally literary canons, to include
work by ‘hitherto’ excluded minorities”8
She makes this comment in the context of an argument for the development of a new, inclusive
historiography that might appreciate and evaluate the dramatic output of women without reference to
the patriarchal norms dominant in twentieth and twenty first century literary criticism. This paper
presents Hywel Teifi Edwards’s study of the Cardiff National Pageant, 1909, The National Pageant of
Wales, (Gomer: Llandysul, 2009) as a radical and expansive contribution to the inclusive discourse
outlined by Bennett.
Queenship in Wales in the High Middle Ages
Sue Johns, Bangor University
The paper considers women and sovereign authority in Wales in the high middle ages. It begins with a
particular case-study, Nest of Deheubarth. Object of one of the most notorious and portentous
abductions of the middle ages, this ‘Helen of Wales’ was both mistress of Henry I and ancestress of a
dynasty which dominated the Anglo-Norman conquests of Ireland, her example raises intriguing
4
Cawr i’w Genedl translates as A Nation’s Hero.
Rhwysg Hanes Cymru translates as ‘The Splendour of Wales’s History’ and is the title given to the Cardiff National Pageant by its historian,
scriptwriter and Deputy Pageant Master - Owen Rhoscomyl.
6
Edwards, Hywel Teifi, The National Pageant of Wales, (Gomer: Llandysul, 2009), p. x.
7
Edwards, Hywel Teifi, ‘Owen Rhoscomyl (1863-1919) a “Rhwysg Hanes Cymru”’ in Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion
2006, vol 13, 2007, p. 122. (datblygiad pwysig yn y proses seicolegol o adeiladu cenedl.’)
8
Susan Bennett, ‘Theatre History, Historiography and Women’s Writing’ in Women, Theatre and Performance: New Histories, New
Historiographies (Manchester, 2000), p. 46.
5
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
19
questions concerning representations of women and power. The paper explores the significance of
representations of queenship for understanding women, gender and power in Wales. It addresses
significant gaps in the historiography of medieval Wales - while queenship and women’s power have
been some of the most vibrant areas of historical scholarship for more than thirty years, Welsh medieval
studies has only slowly begun to respond elements of recent theoretical insights on women, gender and
power. The analysis draws on a range of sources including Welsh legal texts, literary texts such as the
prose tales known as the Mabinogion, the writings of Gerald of Wales and the Brut y Twysogion or
Chronicle of the Princes. It suggests that the memory of queenship as an element of royal power was
transmitted even as the power of the princes, during an age of transformation and change wrought by
interactions with Anglo-Norman invaders in Wales, was itself changed. Such memories were key to the
identity of the Welsh and the idea of queenship in Wales was a complement to, and an active element
of, Welsh kingly dignity. The paper is thus a contribution to studies of elite women and power,
historiographies of power and identity, and in particular it focuses on the evidence relating to queenship
in Wales in the twelfth century.
Being ‘Welsh’ in the Fifth Century: Reconsidering our Archaeological Perspective
Janet Kay, Boston College
This paper studies changes in burial practice in Wales during the fifth century. While the funerary
archaeology of early medieval and early Christian Wales has been a topic of considerable research in the
last several decades, archaeological studies of the long-fifth century—between the withdrawal of the
Roman administration in the late fourth and the creation of independent kingdoms in the early sixth
centuries—are usually left to settlements and economic changes in the post-Roman period. This is due
partly to the relative scarcity of cemeteries in Wales that were can prove were used for burial in the fifth
century. It is also, however, due to the fact that historical and archaeological inquiry into the period is
divided by modern political boundaries, rather than by the contemporary understanding of our fifthcentury subjects as to the world in which they operated and the ways they defined their own
communities.
Wales in the fifth century was the center of migrations from southwestern Scotland, Ireland, and the
Germanized lands to the east. I use archaeological methodologies to understand how the people living in
fifth-century Wales interpreted their own place in the rapidly-changing world. This paper examines how
they used burial practices to define how was or was not included in their community, and therefore how
they understood their relation to both new and familiar neighbors. I first expand the geographical scope
of Wales during this period. Networks of trade and communication encompassed parts of eastern
Ireland, southwestern Scotland, and the lands to the east of the Severn. I include these areas in my
analysis, in order to better understand the social relationships and cultural choices that fifth-century
Welsh people may have used to define their communal identities in funerary rites. Second, I use isotopic
analyses of skeletal material to determine where people from western Britain and Wales migrated
throughout the rest of the island, and whether they were treated differently in death within their new
communities. This allows a more detailed picture of how the people of Wales reacted to changes
wrought by the fifth century, and offers a new model of how both archaeologists and historians might
approach the topic of migration throughout contemporary Britain as a whole.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
20
A poet responds to the life of William Jones Richards (1844 – 1892), Stonemason and Poet.
Tony Kendrew, Hyampom, California
The inspiration a poet finds and uses in historical subjects pins the expression to a particular place and
time. This focus alone gives the poet an advantage communicating with an audience. The extent to
which the mood and imagery of place and time is also used as a springboard to imagination and fantasy
depends to a large extent on the weight a poet gives to historical accuracy.
Poetry and historical accuracy have never slept well together. Even the poets we think of as telling the
story of a historic event - Tennyson, Longfellow, Whitman – pick an image and run with it to convey
emotional, rather than historical, truths. To find out what really happened it’s best to stick with prose.
The allusive, romantic, approach is what poetry does supremely well. It explores peoples’ desires and
motivations, the undercurrent and underbelly of history. For the Welsh, it explores hiraeth.
My historical focus is William Jones Richards, stonemason, born in Cardiganshire in 1844, married Jane
Jones in 1868, left for California in 1878, returned in 1883, died in 1892.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the decline of lead mining in West Wales, where my
subject was employed, and the desertion of farms and mines through emigration. The breaking up of
families was one of the consequences.
William’s exile was expressed in his poetry notebooks dated 1878 to 1890. These do not document his
exile, however, as they pay scant attention to his surroundings, but express his love of God in
exhortations copied into letters home to friends and relatives. The letters are lost, but the very obscurity
of the history enabled me to explore my connection to this ancestor from one end, that is to say as it
relates to my own life and its peregrinations.
In 2014 I submitted my MA dissertation thesis to the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. This was a
reflection on movement, emigration, the biological need to disperse, and its consequences. Entitled
Turning, it drew on the story of William Jones Richards for inspiration and imagery.
Despite the discontinuity and obscurity, and the sheer decay of time, imagination is all it takes to retell
and relive the stories. Therein lies the continuity to historical events and characters, and to my mother’s
family in particular. The richness of the connection is not dependent on the accuracy of the historical
details.
The Welsh Preseli Hills and American Dreaming
Reuben Knutson, Aberystwyth University
In this paper I would like to talk about a history of countercultural practices in Wales in the 1970s. At that
time, Wales contained an abundance of cheap property (such as traditional farmhouses); a rural culture
which was physically removed from Britain’s urban centres (cars were slow and road connections were
poor); and a way of life that appeared, on the surface, to be pre-modern. Therefore, Wales attracted
many who sought an escape from a capitalist-driven urbanity and so sites sprang up where individuals
and communities attempted to fulfil their dreams and experiment with modes of anti-capitalism, archaic
forms of spirituality, alternative models of community, and returns to ‘nature’. Dubbed ‘hippies’ in
popular culture, they looked back to ‘traditional’ values and practices for inspiration, in order to move
forward with revolutionary intent.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
21
But it was a politically sensitive landscape, in which the Welsh culture and language was being fiercely
fought. To place this in a broader context, I will suggest the implications of an alternative culture whose
ideas were imported from America and the impact this had on Wales. My own case study focuses on a
young generation who settled in and around the Preseli Hills in North Pembrokeshire (West Wales) and
were enormously influenced by Californian culture, including Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog which,
produced in California between 1968 and 1972, supported the creation of these kinds of communities
with practical, aesthetic, ideological and spiritual information. Recently, in 2013, in Berlin, an exhibition
entitled The Whole Earth Catalog: California and the Disappearance of the Outside presented a
meditation on the utopian communities being constructed in California during the late 1960s/early
1970s. Brand's Catalog formed the basis of ideas that were highly critical of that utopian idealism, and
exposed a legacy that paved the way for the current neoliberal crisis and its will to commodify all realms
of life. The Catalog, proposed the exhibition, contributed to the creation of a new totality which
unwittingly bypassed the particular or ‘outside’ struggles of, for example, black communities, women
and migrant workers; and so offered a fresh perspective on a similar scenario in Wales.
I will move such critique into a more nuanced study of the relationships between history, heritage and
utopias. The Preseli Hills themselves have been continually reimagined to fulfill political, social and
ideological aspirations, embodying modernity, prehistory, revolution and harmony through their
preservation status, association with Celtic mythology and evidence of Neolithic communities. Using
these two points of reference – California and the Preseli Hills - I will show how my own research,
illustrated with oral histories, film and photographs, addresses questions about the expression of a
Californian ‘atmosphere’ in West Wales. I will argue that the legacy left a deep impact on Welsh
identities at a personal, local and national level, from the branding of Wales as a ‘progressive green
economy’ to the cultural experiences of daily life.
‘Welsh and Khasi Cultural Dialogues’: Mapping Methods of Performance
Lisa Lewis, University of South Wales
This research project is in its first year, of 4, and is funded by The Leverhulme Trust.
This paper will provide an overview of an intercultural, interdisciplinary project, entitled ‘Welsh and
Khasi Cultural Dialogues’, conducted between scholars in Wales and India, investigating the shared
cultural history of the Welsh people and Khasi people of north east India and the influence of this history
on cultural identities. The context of research is the shared history spanning 170 years, from the arrival
of the Welsh missionaries in the Khasi Hills in the 1840s, to the removal of all foreign missionaries from
India in 1967, and beyond, resulting in a complex body of intercultural material. The project utilises
creative arts practice, namely performance and film, to construct a ‘cultural dialogue’ between Welsh
and Indian scholars, one that investigates and responds to their historical relationship.
The discussion in this paper will concentrate on one specific area within the project, namely the use of
performance studies as methodology – an ‘open’ interdisciplinary field – that provides a framework for
folding together historical materials with commentary, enabling different voices to converse. The project
enables an experiential encounter relating to the Welsh-Khasi intercultural contact, an approach that sits
within a growing body of scholarship that uses art making as a research method offering complex and
competing cultural epistemologies.
The chief research question in relation to creative practice investigates the way(s) in which arts practice
may be used to further an interdisciplinary understanding of the history of cultural exchange. By
engaging in a series of ‘cultural dialogues’, utilising creative practice, the project aims to provide a space
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
22
to discuss and respond to the way in which both Welsh and Khasi people have chosen to perform their
cultural identities in the modern world. Further, it examines whether the convergences between arts
forms that offer multifaceted readings of history are able to reflect the nuances and complexities of
postcolonial identities.
Dylan Thomas and Kenneth Rexroth: “Something Terribly Unbritish”
David Lloyd, Le Moyne College
Because British literary journals were the first to publish Dylan Thomas’s poems, beginning in 1933, and
a London publisher issued his first collection in 1934, the earliest reviews of his work were authored by
English critics for London-based journals. While a few American writers and critics attuned to British
developments were aware of Thomas’s early work, it was not until after publication of his second
collection, 25 Poems, in 1936, that commentaries began appearing in the US, with American critical
responses paralleling the British in giving primary attention to Thomas’s innovative and challenging
language. Critics on both sides of the Atlantic with opposing views on the significance of Thomas’s
poetry generally agreed that his subjects were the lyric genre’s traditional themes of birth, death and
love.
It would not be until 1949 – fifteen years after the first reviews of Thomas’s work – that a radically new
understanding of the poems was articulated and widely disseminated when American poet, critic, and
anthologist Kenneth Rexroth argued in the Introduction to his anthology New British Poets that
“Thomas’s impact was not just literary, it was in a special sense social, a cultural coup d’état.” From a
distinctly American orientation, and directed primarily to an American readership, Rexroth contends that
“Thomas smote the Philistine as hard a blow with one small book, Eighteen Poems, as Swinburne had
with Poems and Ballads.” My paper explores the background for and nature of Rexroth’s 1949
intervention.
Kate Roberts a’r Ystlum: intertextuality and rewriting
Rhiannon Marks, Cardiff University
This paper will analyse the significant interaction between modernism and postmodernism as shown in
the work of contemporary Welsh-language short story author, Mihangel Morgan (1955-). Specific
attention will be given to the latest addition to his prolific oeuvre, Kate Roberts a’r Ystlum (Morgan,
2012) which playfully explores the boundary between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’.
Brian McHale notes that postmodernist fiction engages with questions such as ‘what happens when
different kinds of worlds are placed in confrontation, or when boundaries between worlds are violated’.
(McHale, 1987,9). In Morgan’s volume, the problematic notions of ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ collide and as
different ‘worlds’ come together attention is drawn to the disparities between them.
Many of the stories depict real-life Welsh literary figures in fictional situations therefore their personal
histories are effectively rewritten and intertextual connections refer the reader to the original works. The
volume is thus a true exercise in intertextuality and metafiction whereby the ‘original’ sources lurk
beneath the surface in an almost palimpsestic way.
Particular attention will be given to the short story entitled ‘Ymwelydd Syr Thomas’ (Sir Thomas’s visitor)
which portrays the moment when a spectre arrives at the home of eminent Welsh poet, Sir T. H. ParryWilliams (1887-1975), informing him of his impending death. The humorous dialogue exchange between
the poet and Death also presents a textual ‘haunting’ of a different kind as the short story playfully
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
23
subverts the modernist poetry of Parry-Williams and its preoccupation with death. The paper will
consider the way in which such short stories in Kate Roberts a’r Ystlum deconstruct modernist texts, yet
also, paradoxically reaffirm their existence and significance.
Linda Hutcheon notes that ‘modernism literally and physically haunts postmodernism and that their
interrelations should not be ignored’ (1988:49). This paper will hopefully provide interesting scope for
discussion on the interaction between modernism and postmodernism in the context of a minoritylanguage culture.
Remembering the Welsh War Poets and those in Welsh Regiments
Jonathan Morgan
My session proposal is on my latest book, 'The Welsh War Poets, Writers and Artists and those in Welsh
Regiments'. It particualrly looks at how the war poets perceived their Welshness, what spiritually
inspired their poetry especially their perception of 'hiraeth', and also how they got on with their fellow
officers and men. The Royal Welsh Fusiliers in particular are full of writers and poets, and I now belong
to the veterans of the broader Welsh regiment the Royal Welsh which encompasses the Fusiliers, the S
W Borderers and the Welsh Regiment.
A Nation’s History is in its Songs- Welsh Music in America
Mari Morgan, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, with support from the National Welsh
American Foundation.
“A nation’s history is in its songs,” wrote a Welsh-American musicologist, but what happens if the
composer bears allegiance to one country, yet longs for another? Is the ‘song’ a beautiful outpouring, or
an overabundance of musical nationalism? Does migration inevitably lead to musical assimilation, or
cause a state of cultural confusion?
The Cambro-American composers, Dr. Joseph Parry (1841-1903) and Dr. Daniel Protheroe (1868-1934),
experienced these challenges first hand. This paper will explore how each coped with these different
‘worlds’ through focusing on some of the dramatic works of Dr. Parry, and the patriotic output of Dr.
Protheroe, against a backdrop of key historical events, the duality of citizenship, linguistic needs, and the
restless drive to create new music.
This talk is presented by a Welsh-American immigrant who approached this research as a musician with a
passion for history in order to tell a story as a bilingual creative writer.
R.S. and Pantycelyn: Star-Gazing Pilgrims
Nathan Munday, Cardiff University
In The Minister (1952), the narrator says of God that ‘Ann heard Him speak, and Pantycelyn’. This is one
of only two references to William Williams Pantycelyn (1717-1791) in R.S. Thomas’s (1913-2000) oeuvre.
This paper examines the unexpected relationship that exists between Thomas and Pantycelyn in the
pursuit of what Thomas Aquinas calls ‘the experiential knowledge of God’. Thomas seems to amalgamate
the Calvinistic Methodist soul with the Kierkegaardian ‘self’ in the formation of his own poetic pilgrim
figure who travels through terrains of theological immanence and absence before setting off towards the
stars. This figure is a star gazer, imitating an earlier star-gazing Methodist pilgrim from Pantycelyn’s
Golwg ar Deyrnas Crist (1756) and Aurora Borealis (1774).
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
24
Ivor Novello, Wales, and the Celebrity Bachelor
Huw Osborne, Royal Military College of Canada
This paper examines the literary and publicity production of Ivor Novello’s persona in terms of
Welshness, international celebrity, and performative masculinity.
In the first biography to appear following Novello’s death, Novello’s press manager, W. Macqueen-Pope
stresses the star’s romantic Welsh origins. This man of ‘good Welsh blood’ and ‘indomitable Welsh
blood’ had the ‘essence of that land of Wales which gave him birth, that sturdy independence, that
retention of national characteristic and language and that hardiness of spirit drawn from the mountains’.
Several years before Novello’s death, Phyllis Bottome also opens her tribute to Novello by identifying
him as a ‘child of Welsh parents’ from whom music ‘poured’, and she closes in reference to the ‘passion
of sympathy’ in his ‘Welsh heart’. However, as Macqueen-Pope makes clear, this Welshness is only part
of a mobile performance blurring the the lines between stage and biography: ‘There was David Ivor
Davies, the dark-eyed handsome youth from Wales, and there was Ivor Novello, whom the public knew
and adored… It was Ivor Novello who trod the stage, who evoked the gasps of admiration … It was Ivor
Novello who made the world around him gay and who became so entirely a part of the fabric of the
theatre.’ For Macqueen-Pope, the man in the publicity photographs is Welsh, but this image also
circulated widely, blurring into Novello’s many exotic roles. In the public imagination, Novello stood
between Welsh belonging and international indeterminacy. His iconic face was variously described as
Welsh, Celtic, classic, Latin and English, and he played in various national and ethnic roles, linking his
erotic suggestiveness with wide racial exoticism.
This shiftiness, further, was part of ‘making the world around him gay’, and the term ‘gay’ had longstaning connotations in the theatre world by the time this press manager deployed it in the 1950s: ‘like
camp style generally, [the word “gay”] came to signify not secrecy, but acknowledgement of the demand
for secrecy and ironic refusal of it’. Macqueen-Pope characterizes Novello as both the rooted Welshman
and as a camp international gay icon, whose public sexual and national legibility was founded in
performative ambivalence. There is kind of camp national nostalgia (hiraeth) in Michael Williams’s
discussion of Novello’s persona, which appealed to a ‘sense of obsolescence,… a wistful nostalgic longing
(or be-longing) for the past’, one located in a camp exaggeration of identity and identity performance.
The composer and actor is a figure of camp Welsh/international celebrity who drag-kinged romantic
masculinity for a presumptively heterosexual mass audience.
This paper considers Novello’s national and gendered representation in such works as Rhys Davies’s The
Painted King (1954), Phyllis Bottome’s 1934 novelization of Novello’s 1925 film The Rat, Hester
Chapman’s King’s Rhapsody (1950) based on the 1949 Novello musical, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger
(1927) and the novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes on which it was based.
‘Twice Spring Chimed’: Hybridity, Innovation, and Ritual in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas
Adrian Osbourne, Swansea University
This paper seeks to provide an international context to the work of Dylan Thomas by using South
American theories of postcolonial hybridity to identify similar characteristics in his poetry. By analysing
the roles innovation and ritual play in Thomas’s poetry, with a particular focus on ‘Altarwise by owl-light’,
this paper will discuss Thomas’s hybrid position as a poet of Welsh origin, writing in English.
Whilst formative concepts of postcolonial hybridity will be briefly introduced via the work of Frantz
Fanon and Homi Bhabha, the main theoretical analysis will be through Nestor Garcia Canclini’s work,
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
25
Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (1995). This study of contesting cultural,
political, and economic forces in Latin America provides a useful tool for investigating Thomas’s work
from the perspective of postcolonial theory, with a specific emphasis on hybridity. This paper focuses on
two areas of Canclini’s writings in particular: firstly, the role artistic innovators play in a postcolonial
paradigm which can result in ‘processes of segregation as well as of hybridization’ (Canclini, 1995), and
how this is reflected in Thomas’s poetry. Secondly, this paper will apply Canclini’s concept of rituals, as
simultaneously ordering and destabilising phenomena, to ‘Altarwise by owl-light’. Canclini talks of ‘rites
of entry or of passage’ and ‘rites of exit’ in art produced in the interstitial spaces of a hybrid society, and
how these ceremonies of movement can engender not only practices of social and cultural replication,
but also acts of transgression. These approaches to the significance of innovation and ritual allows for an
understanding of the relationship between Thomas’s status as a hybrid writer and the distancing and
unsettling positions found in works such as ‘Altarwise by owl-light’.
‘Guardians of the Public Interest’ and the ‘New Order’: Reflections on Industrial Leadership in
the Welsh Coalfields, 1945-1985
Keith Gildart
Recounting an exchange with the leader of the opposition Labour Party, the Rt Hon Michael Foot MP, on
the sidelines of the Wales-England rugby match in January 1981, the Director of the South Wales Area of
the National Coal Board (NCB), Phillip Weekes, recorded: ‘He [Foot] went on to say that if I had
entertained any glorious ideas of resignation as a protest against Government policy … I should dismiss
them at once. ”9 Weekes’s relationship both with the Conservative Government, and their subsequent
appointee as Chairman of the NCB, Ian MacGregor, were to sour considerably in the period leading up to
his enforced retirement in the aftermath of the 1984-5 Miners’ Strike. Weekes was identified with the
epitome of the NCB manager envisioned for the public corporation by Herbert Morrison; the ‘Guardians
of the public interest’. The tensions which would emerge over the ensuing four years reflected the clash
between this cohort of managers and those associated with what Weekes identified as the ‘New Order’.
In this paper, we explore the industrial politics of Weekes and Tom Ellis the North Wales colliery
manager, and subsequently Labour and later Social Democratic Party Member of Parliament, within the
broader context of the transformation and decline of the British coal industry. Both Weekes and Ellis
contrasted markedly with the reputation of the Director of the Scottish Area during the 1984-85 miners’
strike, Bert Wheeler (one of Ian MacGregor’s chessmen) who, though a Scot and from a mining
background, was perceived as an ‘outsider’ who had ‘transgressed the moral economy of the Scottish
coalfields’.10 Drawing on Erik Olin Wright’s concept of ‘contested locations’, as well as the literature of
‘moral economy’, we explore the importance of location (temporally, geographically, and
organisationally) over time to develop an understanding of industrial leadership in Wales after 1945 and
the broader managerial and organisational culture of the NCB.11
9
Phillip Weekes Diary, entry, 17 January 1981, National Library of Wales.
Andrew Perchard and Jim Phillips, ‘Transgressing the “Moral Economy”: Wheelerism and Management of the Nationalised Coal Industry in
Scotland’, Contemporary British History 25 (2011), pp.387 – 406.
11
Erik Olin Wright, ‘Rethinking, Once Again, the Concept of Class Structure’ in John R. Hall (ed.) Reworking Class (Ithaca, 1997), pp.41-72; Edward
P. Thompson (1971) ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century’, Past & Present 50 (1971), pp.76-136; Andrew Sayer, ‘Moral
Economy and Political Economy’, Studies in Political Economy 61 (2000), pp.79 – 103.
10
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
26
Creating a Casus Belli: The Welsh Press and the July Crisis of 1914
Meilyr Powel
How and why the British state took the decision to go to war in 1914 has been argued and counterargued exhaustively for over 90 years, and remains to this day a contentious issue. The British
justification for war, the casus belli, continues to divide opinion, with some historians focussing on the
importance of contemporary public attitudes as facilitating factors in the decision-making process, rather
than concentrating solely on the activities of diplomats and politicians. Based on a chronological and
thematic approach, this paper critically engages with Welsh press representations of the July Crisis of
1914.
The orthodox British history of the July Crisis paints a picture of the country embroiled in ‘war
enthusiasm’, as politicians took the decision to go to war on the cusp of a giant wave of patriotic fervour.
Social, political and sociological historians have all contributed to this popular narrative, which to a large
degree remains prominent in British public history of the war.
In the aftermath of a revisionist interpretation however, which identifies a more measured and
considered response within British public attitudes to the European Crisis, the reconciliation of the two
distinct narratives has since become the focus for many current historians of the period. Through a
careful study of Welsh press content during this period, this paper shows that a more complicated,
nuanced picture existed in the public domain. Continental affairs proved secondary to the issue of Irish
Home Rule until very late, and comprised a mixture of short-sightedness, fearfulness and furore
regarding the coming war. By discerning various attitudes in Welsh public discourse at the time, this
paper contributes valuable empirical research to both the July Crisis and also the often overlooked Welsh
experience of the First World War.
Mediating Elections in Post-Devolution Wales
Sian Powell, Cardiff University
Since 1999 and the opening of the National Assembly for Wales the media in Wales and across the UK
have had to face the challenges of communicating and reflecting multi-level governance. Many reports
have looked at the way devolved matters have been reflected across the UK (Lewis, J et al. 2008. Four
Nations Impartiality Review: An analysis of reporting devolution); these reports have outlined that many
stories regarding devolved matters and policy differences between the Governments across the UK have
been overlooked by the London centric nature of the BBC and their lack of knowledge and information
about devolution.
This paper interprets the news agenda and news values of BBC television news programmes in Wales
during the General Elections and the National Assembly for Wales Elections between 2010 and 2016.
The paper will analyse a national (UK) news programme, News at Six and a regional, Wales Today
programme in English and the mixed news programme Newyddion 9 in Welsh; all are produced by the
BBC but Newyddion 9 is broadcast on S4C. Following a 4 week content analysis during the election
periods, the paper will analyse whether different running orders suggest that different emphasis is given
to different stories and events in both languages. The paper argues that, following devolution across the
UK, a mixed news programme for each nation within the UK, like Newyddion 9, offers the electorate
greater opportunity to grasp which policy areas are devolved and non-devolved across the UK and which
policy areas are of relevance to the viewers in Wales during a Elections.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
27
The paper will also examine the relationship between the journalists and the political parties including
examining whether this has had any effect on the news coverage of Welsh politics following devolution
and whether it is possible to locate a distinctive public sphere developing in Wales post-devolution.
Deep Mapping the Welsh Coastline: The Ground Beneath my Feet
Ellie Rees
The paper acts as an introduction to my decision to ‘deep map’ a tiny strip of the Welsh coastline in the
form of a collection of poetry. The first part is an evocation of the area covered. It starts in the west
with St Donat’s Castle, owned by the American millionaire, Randolph Hearst in the 1920s and 30s, now
the home of Atlantic College. This college has sent many students over the years to American
universities including Harvard. Two miles to the east is Llantwit Major, where there was another
‘college’, a famous centre for Celtic Christian learning in the fifth century. The land between these two
places is as it has been for at least a thousand years, farmland, bordered by the high cliffs of the Heritage
Coast and the Bristol Channel.
The paper begins by quoting Gilbert White and RS Thomas to the effect that ‘every kingdom, every
province should have its own monographer’ and that, ‘There is no present in Wales/And no future/There
is only the past/Brittle with relics.’ One such relic is St Donat’s Castle, which is now inhabited by a vibrant
international body of students. This incongruity is explored: the layering of the past as reflected in the
geology of the sedimentary cliffs, the ancient ruins and the effect of the present upon the landscape.
Also the fact that the college has nurtured the future careers of gifted teenagers for more than fifty
years. Some space is given to the effect on the local town of Randolph Hearst’s ownership of the castle
in the 1920s and 30s but essentially I aim to evoke for the listener a clear picture of what this two and a
half mile stretch of Welsh coastline is like to live in, now and in the past.
The paper then goes on to note how both British and American writers still seem to be following Gilbert
White’s advice in The Natural History of Selborne: ‘Men that undertake only one district are much more
likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted
with.’ References are made to British writers: the diarist Francis Kilvert, writing in the nineteenth
century, John Lewis-Stempel and Mark Cocker writing in the twenty-first century as well as American
writers such as Thoreau, Annie Dillard and David George Haskell. They all confine their writings about
place to a single small area and to the space or seasons of one year. They also have all chosen to write
prose.
The paper is largely descriptive and not intellectually demanding. A brief reference to the influence of
William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth will form the conclusion.
Are there “dialects” in Mid-Wales?
Iwan Rees, Cardiff University
General overviews of Welsh dialects (e.g. Awbery, 1984, 2009; G. E. Jones, 1984; Ball & Williams, 2001;
Hannahs, 2013) distinguish between northern and southern phonological systems. It is therefore
surprising that the nature of the phonological transitions found in mid-Wales has hitherto not been a
serious subject of investigation.
Drawing on material first presented in my PhD thesis (Rees, 2013), this paper aims to investigate the
extent to which socially uniform groups of Welsh speakers from mid-Wales are linguistically
homogeneous. The fieldwork was conducted in two adjacent areas in the region, the districts around
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
28
Harlech and Tywyn, and concentrated solely on the speech of the older generation. Four phonological
variables were subsequently selected and quantitatively analysed; three of which will be explored in
detail in this presentation, namely the high central vowel [ɨ:], the fronted and raised low vowel [æ:], and
the palatalised velar plosives [kj]/[gj].
The results of this paper show that complex patterns of variation arise in both areas when both linguistic
and extra-linguistic factors are taken into consideration, even in the case of people who could be
considered similar in social, cultural and educational terms. Consequently, I will explore the extent to
which it may be possible to justify the view of Gaston Paris (1888) that ‘il n’y a réellement pas de
dialectes’, especially when dialects are defined as ‘relatively unified language varieties used by discrete
groups within a well defined geographical area’ (Durrell, 1990: 942).
“He is more fickle than I can describe”: The Relationship between Landlord and Agent, a
South- West Wales Case Study, 1841-47
Lowri Ann Rees, Bangor University
The role of middle-men in Wales is an under-researched area, and in particular, the role of the land
agent on Welsh estates. Occupying a difficult position in society, the land agent was generally an
unpopular figure. Often reviled by tenants, his duties included the collecting of rents, overseeing
improvement work and dealing with disputes. The land agent was ultimately responsible for enforcing
his employers’ orders. It is no wonder, therefore, that they proved a convenient scapegoat for the
landlord, who could hide behind his land agent whenever difficult business needed to be transacted.
By focusing on the personal letters of Thomas Herbert Cooke, land agent to the Middleton Hall estate in
south-west Wales between 1841 and 1847, this paper will consider the fraught relationship that could
exist between agent and landlord. His employer, Edward Abadam, was a source of much frustration and
misery for Cooke. However, Cooke’s letters also present a fascinating insight into the working life of the
agent, the way the estate was managed, and as a newcomer, his impressions of the Welsh language, and
the culture and practices of the local population. Cooke also found himself in south-west Wales during
the height of the Rebecca Riots and, along with his employer, was singled out by the rioters and accused
of collecting high levels of rent and oppressing the tenantry.
The aim of this paper therefore is to highlight the value, but also limitations, of private correspondence
as a source when studying the role of the land agent. The paper will also consider the precarious nature
of the employer-employee relationship as shown in this case study.
Memorializing Wales: Paul Robeson, The Spanish Civil War, and the Politics of Welsh
Commemoration
Mark Rhodes, Kent State University
Historically, Wales’ memorial landscapes were created and influenced by its union with England, its
position within the British Empire, and internal political power struggles. Post-devolution, Welsh
memorialization continues to see political strife. This paper analyzes and contributes toward the
underdeveloped critical colonial discussion of the memorial landscapes in Wales, especially those
influenced by the Labour, Communist, and Plaid Cymru parties. With memorial landscape meaning the
various ways memory is represented and constructed in place, I look specifically in Wales at the
memorial landscapes that can be found in museums, archives, public spaces, artistic venues, political
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
29
offices, and government buildings. Each political party utilizes the memory of the Spanish Civil War, Paul
Robeson, and their connections to Robeson’s philosophies to perpetuate different national ideologies. I
analyze how these landscapes of Paul Robeson, and to a lesser extent the Spanish Civil War, represent
ideas of socialism, communism, and nationalism and how these politicized memorial landscapes effect
ideas of the Welsh nation. This paper reveals how each of these parties attempt to construct memory in
Wales and the various intricate discourses embedded in the Welsh memorial landscape of the Spanish
Civil War and Paul Robeson.
Gwerin, Cymrodyr, Hiraeth and Bodlon: Who is Wales?
Brian Roper
The editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannia once wrote that it ‘…could arrange for contributions for almost
every subject within the range of learning, but when they came to the item WALES, they found
themselves absolutely devoid of a single idea in reference to the history of the country and of its people,
and so they had no alternative other than to place on record in their great work: – WALES – see England’
(1896: 300).
This paper will explore historic and contemporary interpretations of Welsh identity as expressed in
creative writing about Wales. It draws upon research being undertaken at Swansea University by the
author[1]
The paper develops Anderson’s conception of nations as imagined communities “because the members
of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of
them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983: 15).
This process of social construction is further explored by reference to Martin (1995) and Wodak, De
Cillia, Reisigl, and Liebhart (1999) who have identified language and discourse as the essential means
through which the uniqueness and distinctness of a community and its particular values are presented.
Anderson argues that conceived in language, rather than blood, nations and national identities, when
perceived as imagined communities, are essentially socially constructed (Anderson, 1983:133).These are
“mobilised into existence through symbols invoked by political leadership” (Dryzek, 2006: 35).
The senses of an evolving “Welshness” based on an emergent consensus that there is no single Welsh
identity but that it is based on a diversity of experience, culture and language, is presented in this paper
as a creative opportunity.
The Welsh Language and Social Integration from the Point of View of the New Polish
Emigration to Wales
Karolina Rosiak, Poznań, Poland
The paper will discuss the beliefs of Polish migrants to Wales regarding the importance of learning Welsh
for integration with their local Welsh communities. The Welsh Assembly Government 2012 report
Getting On Together – a community cohesion strategy for Wales encourages the citizens of Wales to
learn the Welsh language claiming that having skills in Welsh is claimed to “help you feel part of your
new community, to make friends and to access any important information and services you may need”.
Poland’s accession to the European Union in 2004 resulted in Polish nationals migrating to the UK in
unprecedented numbers. Migration Observatory recorded over 18,000 Poles living in Wales in 2014 and
the biggest Polish communities can be found in Llanelli (Carmarthenshire), Wrexham (Clwyd) and Cardiff
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
30
(Glamorgan). Whereas some Poles open up to the local communities by organizing events celebrating
Polish culture and history, others learn Welsh to familiarize themselves with local culture and society.
The present study analyses data obtained from 11 participants having varying skills in Welsh, ranging
from a very basic communicative knowledge of the spoken language to native-like competency. Overall
attitude towards the receiving communities and the language were positive with participants admitting
that even the most basic knowledge of Welsh helps with positive relationships and greater acceptance
on the part of the receiving communities.
Welsh and Khasi Cultural Dialogues: A short film
Aparna Sharma, University of California Los Angeles
This short documentary video seeks to share with the viewer a prototype of ‘episodic’ documentaries
that will be developed further in the Welsh-Khasi Cultural Dialogues project over the coming 4 years. The
‘episodic’ film is a category of film identified by film theorist Siegfried Kracauer, who defines it as a form
in which film narrative emerges from the ‘flow of life’ in the physical world (Kracauer, 1960). The aim of
these episodic documentaries is to devise a formal vocabulary through which the cultural
dialogues/interactions between the Welsh and Khasi peoples can be depicted in intersecting and
conjoined terms. Through this, the films seek to complicate the coloniser/colonised binaries and evoke
smaller cultures within this wider framework as interacting and mutually constitutive, rather than
discrete or hermetically sealed entities. The video will illustrate one element (landscape, language or
literature) that enacts the interaction of Welsh and Khasi cultural elements. These elements will span
such categories as cultural ideas, thoughts, aesthetics, memory, historical facts and/or affective traces.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, 1960
Emigrants/Immigrants – Past and Present
With video illustrations from “The Dragon and the Eagle”
Colin Thomas
“I am trying to recover the self I lost.”12 That is the way in which George Gumisiriza, a recent immigrant
from Uganda, describes the sense of disorientation he feels as he comes to terms with his new life in
Newport.
It is a feeling that many Welsh emigrants to North America would have shared. They faced the same kind
of tension as recent immigrants to Wales – how to reconcile their need to become good citizens of their
new country with their wish to hold on to their language, their culture and their values.
Some Welsh migrants arriving in what they saw as the ‘Land of Liberty’ set out to turn that perception
into a reality. Cadwalader Morgan, who moved from Meirionnydd to Meirion in Pennsylvania, was
prepared to challenge the Quaker acceptance of slavery in the 1690s and Morgan John Rhys, whilst
preparing to set up a distinct community, a Gwladfa for Welsh migrants, didn’t hold back from
denouncing the behaviour of the Southern plantation owners he encountered.
Recent immigrants to Wales, especially those not sharing the religion of their host country, have felt
more constrained about expressing dissent. “Followers of minority religions have been treated as
second-class citizens within the Welsh religious and civic spheres”13 writes Paul Chambers in his essay in
12
Conversation and correspondence with author
13
Paul Chambers “Religious Diversity in Wales” published in “A Tolerant Nation? Revisiting Ethnic Diversity in a devolved Wales” by University of
Wales Press 2015 p219
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
31
A Tolerant Nation? Many have responded by holding on tight to their original culture, seeking
reassurance through traditional dress and food and by remaining within the community cluster of those
with whom they share a language.
Some Welsh emigrants followed the same route. For many years Hyde Park in Scranton Pennsylvania was
what Professor Bill Jones described as “a mini-Wales. Here Welsh postman walked along Welsh-named
streets to deliver letters to Welsh homes; on their rounds they passed and served Welsh stores, Welsh
saloons, Welsh funeral homes, Welsh banks, Welsh churches and that veritable boiler-room of
Welshness, the Baner American block, with its myriad of Welsh businesses and the Welsh Philosophical
Library.”14
But a few Welsh emigrants saw their move as an opportunity to step outside the culture in which they
had grown up and to re-invent themselves. This connects to what Gumisiriza Gwilliam observes about
those of his fellow migrants who “are able to break free from the social ties of especially culture and
faith that may have restricted them in their native countries.”
The situation of Welsh migrants in the past can illuminate policies for migrants to Wales in the present.
Although A Tolerant Nation? claims that such policies in Wales are less harsh than those in the rest of the
U.K.15, “there would seem to be little scope for self congratulation.”16
‘Gwnewch sylw o’m sefyllfa, Dyn cripil ydwyf fi’: Ballads and Disability in Nineteenth Century
Wales
Steve Thompson, Aberystwyth University
This paper will consider the relationship between disability and ballads in nineteenth century Wales. On
the one hand, it will consider the motivations of people with a variety of sensory and physical
impairments who turned to ballad writing and performance as a means to make ends meet. On the
other hand, the paper will consider the content of ballads in order to assess the ways in which disability
was understood and represented in this particular context. In a sense, ballads are a distinctive historical
source because they offer a first-person narrative of the lived experience of disability and give an insight
into the ways in which disabled people in the past understood their lives and their place in the
community.
Wales and the Crisis of the Fifteenth Century
Tim Thornton, Huddersfield University
This paper challenges the idea that Wales was integral to the crisis of rule and lordship which affected
the territories of the English crown in the fifteenth century. There has for several centuries been a sense
that disruptive influences from Wales played a significant role in the breakdown of the Lancastrian
monarchy under Henry VI and the instability that followed during the Wars of the Roses. An increasing
understanding of the aftermath of the Glyn Dŵr rebellion has reinforced this view.
While not suggesting that we have misunderstood the dynamic picture of fifteenth-century Wales
offered by scholars such as Rees Davies and Ralph Griffiths, as typified by declining English lordship and
emerging Welsh leadership which was frequently involved in competitive and often violent struggles, it is
14
William Jones “Wales in America- Scranton and the Welsh 1860-1920” p27
Op cit p292
16
Op cit p44
15
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
32
important to correct a misinterpretation of the overall breakdown across the territories of the crown as
being driven significantly from Wales.
An example of this would be the suggestion that the Lancastrian regime of the late 1450s was distinctive
for its reliance on the principality of Wales. The common emphasis on its association with Wales is a
product of late sixteenth-century historiography. Henry VI and those around him were neither
particularly stimulated by fear of Welsh disorder nor motivated by a hope of Welsh support. When the
court moved to the midlands in 1456 the resources of the principality were far from easily accessible,
and even thereafter the efforts made to draw on them were limited in their ambition and impact.
Financial flows to the regime were restricted, and the political networks established, especially in the
North, were limited and highly dependent on the Stanleys. By 1459-60, therefore, the regime found little
to rely on there, and the Yorkists were able to supplant them with relative ease. There are similar
problems with attempts to make Edward IV’s kingship in any sense significantly dependant on Welsh
support, whether in its early days after the victory at Mortimer’s Cross near Wigmore, or in the other
battle which has been seen as a confrontation with Wales, Edgcote in 1469.
The communities of territories like Wales were neither easily manipulable pawns in English power
politics, nor chaotic and frightening manifestations of the ‘other’ that might drive events in a different
fashion. This approach makes it easier to understand how the Welsh were integrated into English society
in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and provides a context for the ways in which Henry VII
constructed himself (and was constructed) in personal terms and more generally in his kingship as in part
Welsh.
How Macho Is My Valley? Contemporary Welsh Women Novelists (Re-)writing the Valleys
Robert Walton, Cardiff University
‘The Valleys’ is a male construct, both literally and culturally. From the ‘masters’ of iron, coal, tin and
copper who financed the industrialisation of the geological formations running south of the Brecon
Beacons to the Swansea-Newport coastline, to the labour-force who built and worked the furnaces,
mines and transport-routes, and the religious and political leaders who mobilised the faiths and values of
towns and villages, ‘The Valleys’ came to represent, in the popular imagination at least, what a current
marketing slogan calls ‘the heart and soul of Wales’. The literature of The Valleys reflects this male
lineage, from Rhys Davies, Jack Jones and Lewis Jones to Gwyn Thomas, Idris Davies and Alun Lewis, and,
more recently, Ron Berry and Christopher Meredith. Individually and collectively they have shaped our
reading of The Valleys as a Welsh cultural trope, with the Cilhendre novels of Menna Gallie standing
alone, as the sole female voice in the tradition and somewhat marginalised.
But this is only half the story at most, viewed from an androcentric perspective. As Katie Gramich says,
‘male and female authors frequently conceive of and project different constructs of Wales and
Welshness, indicative of contemporary gender ideologies’ (North American Journal of Welsh Studies, Vol.
6, 1: Winter 2011). In Struggle or Starve: Women’s Lives in the South Wales Valleys Between the Two
World Wars (Honno: 1998) Carol White and Sian Rhiannon Williams present the voices of women whose
role not only involved ‘constraint or sacrifice’ in the ‘gendered division of labour’ in the home but also
sustained political and social activism in their communities. In the twenty-first century, a different
narrative of The Valleys is emerging through the novels of contemporary women writers. This paper will
look at the new, female construct of The Valleys in the novels of Rachel Trezise, Catrin Dafydd and Rhian
Elizabeth, particularly their appraisal of what Gramich calls ‘the often stereotypical and muscular
masculinity of popular history.’ It will examine the ways in which the female characters - moving towards
greater confidence and self-definition in the face of poverty, abuse and the attempts by deracinated men
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
33
to retain a degree of patriarchal hegemony – project an alternative construct of the balance of power in
gender relationships in recent times.
‘Men Cannot Long Remain Idle and Still Remain Men’: Miners’ Bodies and Masculine Identity
in Interwar South Wales
Dr Stephanie Ward, Cardiff University
The characterisation of miners as being physically tough and embodying a particularly macho form of
masculinity can be found in many forms of literature and imagery in the first half of the twentieth
century. In artwork it is the chiselled jaws and granite-like muscles of miners which are most evident, and
such representations were repeated in novels, social investigations and newspaper articles. Despite the
quite evident connection between miners’ bodies and masculinity, little work has been completed by
historians into this area. Indeed, constructions of miners’ masculinity have rarely been explored although
there were clearly implications for family life, friendship bonds, leisure activities and the structures of
community and political cultures. The purpose of my paper is to interrogate constructions of miners’
masculinity in interwar south Wales. In the 1930s, debates about the body took place against the
backdrop of mass unemployment, when governments took greater interest in the welfare and activities
of the working class, and during a period of growing interest in fitness and the body. My paper will first
consider the importance of the physical strength of the muscular body in the formation of a masculine
identity in mining communities. I will then use an examination of governmental and voluntary labour
camps set up for the unemployed to discuss whether we can see miners’ bodies as a space where
questions of work, skill, labour and ownership were negotiated.
Dylan Thomas and Rural-Urban Modernity
Andrew Webb, Bangor University
In ‘The Peaches’, the opening story of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Dylan Thomas famously
depicts the movement of the young narrator, a barely disguised Dylan, from suburban Swansea into the
traditional culture of the Carmarthenshire hinterland. This direction of travel is repeated in ‘A Visit to
Grandpa’s’, and it underpins the narrative in other short stories from A Portrait. It is also inscribed into
the conceit of the surreal ‘Jarvis valley’ stories, including ‘The Tree’, ‘The Enemies’ and ‘The Dress’, as
well as his poetry from the mid-late 1930s. Thomas’s juxtaposition of the urban/suburban with the rural
is mirrored in his depiction of the co-existence of their different temporalities: the linear-modern with
the cyclical-epochal.
While Thomas’s upbringing in the newly-built suburb of Uplands, on the edge of a rural Welsh
hinterland, is the obvious source of these geographical and temporal pairings, my paper suggests that
Thomas’s work, in these juxtapositions, is representative of a broader pattern of international modernist
writing. In making this argument, my work takes theoretical inspiration from Franco Moretti’s idea of
modern national literatures emerging as a ‘structural compromise’ between the formal influence of a
mainstream Western tradition and local material and form; and recent attempts by the Warwick
Research Collective (Neil Lazarus et al) to extend the Marxist notion of ‘combined and uneven
development’ to the study of literature. Their work focuses on the literature that is produced in
geographical spaces in which pre-capitalist practice clashes with societies organised around practices of
new, capitalist modernity.
Specifically, then, I contend that these clashes of the traditional and the modern in Thomas are
registered on the level of form, in particular in the ‘structural compromise’ that is evident in the prose
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
34
and the poetry written between 1935 and 1940. In pursuing this line of enquiry, I hope to offer a way of
‘grounding’ Thomas’s hybridity, and his gothic-grotesque style in a theory of emergent Welsh
modernism, and to consider the surreal and the realist aspects of his work through the same critical lens.
"Untranslatables" and the translation of Welsh-American Writing
Esther Whitfield, Brown University
Reading the collaborative Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2014), Emily Apter
proposes "untranslatability" as a condition of both literary theory and philosophy, and as a deflationary
counterpoint to the idea of "world literature." Drawing particularly from Apter's analysis of the
Portuguese "untranslatable" saudade, which she relates to the Welsh hiraeth, this paper will reassess the
process of translating Henry M. Edwards's 1869 play, Mordecai a Haman. It will propose that at the core
of the play, its context and its legacy - and of the literary and philosophical project towards which Apter
gestures - is its polysemic, or "untranslatable," word cenedl.
'Hateful the man who loves not the country that nurtured him': The Aberystwyth University
College's fundraising expedition to North America, 1890.
Calista Williams, Open University
In the summer of 1885 Aberystwyth College was devastated by fire; but fortunately the college library
was saved due to the valiant efforts of staff and students. The library, up until this point, had been
perpetually under-funded, but had received several donations of important books and manuscripts, as
the library was also operating as a de facto National Library for Wales, following a decision at the Mold
Eisteddfod in 1873.
Following the fire, the newly designed college included a purpose-built library, but the renovation work
was a huge drain on the college’s coffers. In response to this shortfall, the college principal and eminent
non-conformist minister, Thomas Charles Edwards, embarked on a tour of America and Canada in the
summer of 1890 to collect donations from Welsh migrants for the library’s fixtures and fittings, which
were estimated to cost £1,000. Edwards’ extensive tour of North America took him from New York to
California, visiting non-conformist chapels to preach sermons and collect for the library fund. Although
this tour is alluded to in the key histories of the college, it has not been situated within the wider context
of nineteenth century Welsh migration or examined through the lenses of national identity and diaspora
theory.
This study draws upon the college's reports which document the logistics of the visit, and the financial
records which provide a detailed breakdown of the donations received from each location. Edwards'
correspondence offers a window on how the trip was planned and the key connections he made during
his trip. Finally, the Welsh newspapers published in Wales and in North America report on the expedition
and record the reactions to the fundraising exercise. This study sits within a larger body of work which
explores the development of a Welsh Library at Aberystwyth College, a precursor to the later National
Library of Wales, and investigates the relationship between this institution and national identity.
The fundraising tour was a success and Edwards was able to raise the full £1,000, with over half the
money raised in New York and Pittsburgh. The new library opened in 1892 to celebrate the college’s
twentieth year and a plaque was installed in the new library to honour the contributors, which included
the patriotic proverb: hateful the man who loves not the country that nurtured him. The emotive
language included in the inscription reveals the patriotic nature of the campaign and the emphasis
placed on a Welsh-American sense of national identity. The experience of attending sermons, delivered
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
35
by this eminent preacher from Wales, likely provoked a sense of connectivity to past chapel experiences,
and a yearning for the traditions of the homeland. For Edwards, his ability to trigger these emotions had
the potential to increase the donations for the college library.
Samuel Roberts, Abolition and Assimilation
Daniel Williams, Swansea University
Sidney Kaplan (“The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” Journal of Negro History 34.3 (July
1949): 274 - 343) has discussed the role of the ‘miscegenation debate’ in the 1864 election in the United
States. He naturally made no reference to an article entitled ‘Cymysgiad Achau’ (The Mixing of Lineages)
by Samuel Roberts, Llanbrynmair (1800 - 1885), who had settled in Tennessee in 1857. Roberts’s essay
was hugely controversial for he advocated miscegenation. My discovery of this piece was a result of my
work with the Longfellow Institute. Roberts argued for the eradication of all nationalist feelings when his
liberalism came face to face with American racial tensions at the time of the Civil War. This paper
explores the cultural and political significance of Roberts’s explosive essay, places it in context and
explores uses made of it in recent cultural criticism.
Articulating 'Afallon'? Sketching a Welsh Intellectual History
Huw Williams, Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol
Ynys Afallon is the utopian island in Welsh mythology associated with youth, abundance and fertility. In
approaching the question of a 'Welsh' intellectual history it seems an apt motif in more than one
sense. First is the fundamental question of in what sense such an intellectual history might be thought
to exist. One task of this paper therefore is to provide an interpretation of how one might articulate
such an idea - what ideas, figures and traditions could constitute such a history. A second task is to make
the case that this history is in a sense unique enough to be thought of as characteristically Welsh. In this
respect it will be argued that if one considers three key traditions in the Welsh context - nationalist,
socialist and internationalist - what unifies their intellectual aspects is the tendency towards utopianism.
Lewis Edwards and the ‘Chwalfa Fawr’
Ioan Williams, Aberystwyth University
The Chwalfa Fawr of this title refers to the sweeping change which took place in Wales in the decades
between 1860 and 1900, when the ideology which underpinned the structure of Welsh Nonconformist
culture underwent a dramatic and sudden collapse. As J. Tudur Jones described the situation midcentury, the culture that had grown up around the Nonconformist chapels had come to be seen as an
essential and a major part of Welsh identity. Yet at the same time the theology on which these structures
were based was losing its grip on the very sectors of the population which had traditionally been its
strongest supporters.
My aim in this paper is to suggest that this collapse resulted from an intellectual failure connected to the
strongest elements in Welsh nonconformist itself. In order to do this, I concentrate attention on perhaps
the single most important figure in Welsh intellectual life in the period between 1840 and 1870 – Dr
Lewis Edwards, arguing that Edwards’s adaptation of modernist strategies in defence of Calvinist
orthodoxy had the effect of confirming obscurantist elements in contemporary Welsh thought. This is
particularly clear in his treatment of the central Calvinist doctrine of the Atonement which represented a
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
36
blank refusal to come to terms with the central tendencies of European thought over the period
between 1850 and 1900.
My argument is that Edwards’s failure to meet the challenge of the modern world was representative of
the leading figures in Nonconformist culture and that it deprived Welsh speaking Wales of intellectual
leadership at the very historical moment when the potential existed for the assimilation of modernist
thought and Nonconformist culture. The result was a collapse of intellectual resistance to the forms of
modernism most destructive to Welsh culture to which the country was increasingly exposed as a result
of the introduction of compulsory English education.
We have to ask why this happened, and particularly why a man like Lewis Edwards, founding editor of Y
Traethodydd, who introduced Welsh readers to the work of Kant and Coleridge, should have been
associated with it. We have a clue, perhaps in the ambiguity of his attitude to Welsh and English. Few
could be said to have done more for the development of Welsh culture in his generation, but at the same
time few could be more convincingly accused of treachery to the cause of Welsh language and culture.
The explanation must be sought in a sensibility formed within a monolingual community where
emotional and familial relationships took shape around the central experience of Evangelical conversion.
Central to Edwards’s identity was his loyalty to a theology to which other components of that identity
could be no more than subordinate. Later, with the pressures of Victorian society, came the the
persuasion that the future lay with a monolingual English world. That conviction, however, in no way
lessened his day by day commitment to a Welsh world still vibrant and expansive. In my view that
particular form of psychosis is explicable only by the idea that his identity was not threatened by the
abandonment of the language but that it was protected within the ideological structure within which it
had been formed. In effect, as is often the case, what initially gave him strength became a debilitating
weakness, the effects of which we still feel.
“For the grave has extinguish'd its light”: Countering Stasis in Felicia Heman’s Welsh Melodies
Kent F. Williams, Rio Grande, Ohio
Although William Wordsworth’s view was not unmixed with some criticism, his admiration for Felicia
Hemans is clearly underscored in his “Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg.” For
Wordsworth, she was “that holy Spirit / Sweet as the Spring” (37-38), the only woman he included in this
late poem’s list of remembered poets. Lord Byron, too, recognized her presence - and poetic
competition. Referring to her as “Mrs. He-Man,” “Byron preferred women in their place, not his. ‘I do
not despise [her],’ Bryon said, ‘but if [she] knit blue stockings instead of wearing them it would be
better’” (Wolfson and Manning 877). Although Felicia Hemans (1793-1835) lived to be only 41, she
rivaled Byron in popularity, writing 19 books of poetry and drama and remaining popular in both America
and England throughout the nineteenth century and into the twnetieth. Although nearly forgotten by
the 1980s, Hemans has excited renewed critical interest. While her writing speaks with myriad voices,
cultures, and histories, her home was north Wales (in rural St. Asaph), where she lived from 1799 until
the late 1820s. There, not only did she find a place to learn a number of languages, to read widely, to
love Shakespeare, and to perfect her ability to write, but she discovered a “center,” a point of reference
with which to apprehend the multiplicities of her poetic, historical, and social voice. As Elizabeth
Edwards states, “Wales was a formative and continual influence on Hemans's writing life” (83). However,
as Edwards continues, it is in her A Selection of Welsh Melodies (1822), a songbook she produced with
the Denbighshire musician John Parry, that “as a whole, and especially Hemans' footnotes to her song
texts, can be productively read as an attempt to construct a layered but resistant Welsh identity” (84).
Thus, Heman’s Welsh Melodies—in such poems as “The Sea-Song of Gavran,” “The Hall of Cynddylan,”
“The Rock of Cader Idris,” “Taliesin’s Prophecy” and others—counter the stasis of an historical Welsh
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
37
past. In the rich possibilities of her Welsh “songs” combined with her own inclusions of paratext from
such eighteenth century Welsh sources as Edward Davies, Edward Jones, Thomas Pennant, and Owen
Pughe, Hemans revivifies the Welsh past, on which she sees the emergence (to which she substantively
contributes) of a new and vital culture of Welsh life and song.
‘Llon heddy yw llenyddiaeth’: Language, Culture and Literature in 19th Century Welsh
America.
Rhiannon Heledd Williams, University of South Wales
Language could not exist in a vacuum in America, and for the Welsh it was a natural mode of expression
for their traditional culture, just as it had been in the Old Country. For a number of nations, its
importance cannot be underestimated as a sort of ‘social passport’ that promoted the nation’s unique
cultural attributes. The bond between language and culture formed the backbone of exiled Welsh
identity due to the essence of communication. This combination reflected their autonomy amongst the
melting-pot of America, and the symbiotic relationship between them created a sense of unity.
One of the most prominent ways of maintaining their nationality was creating a new culture based on
their native language. This entity would represent their Old World ties as well as eventually adopting an
American flavour. It consisted of elements such as religion, societies, festivals and print material.
Welshness was fostered mainly within a cultural sphere, which tended to be centered around the chapel
and the print medium. This readership formed a core community that was essential in sharing the
nation’s principal values.
One of the most potent modes of expression to enable the nation to redefine itself and preserve the
language and its historical associations was literature. As products of imagination, prose and poetry
afforded the nation a natural process in which to portray their newborn identity as Welsh-Americans –
especially due to the lack of political independence. Building a new literary tradition brought forth a solid
ideological framework for language use and a sense of belonging to a print community.
Literature enabled authors to interpret meanings on behalf of the audience who were striving to make
sense of their new surroundings. Did the emigrants from Wales succeed in creating a new literary
tradition across the Atlantic? How did the periodical press contribute to sustaining this culture?
‘You can’t print a thunderstorm, and reproduce the lightning’s flash.’ 17 Performing the Welsh
Repertoire
Rhiannon Williams, University of South Wales
The American academic, Diana Taylor, states that there are two types of knowledge, the archive and the
repertoire. The archive is tangible information: maps and bones, books and words. The other type is the
repertoire, knowledge which derives from the body and its histories: movement, storytelling, ritual. This
paper seeks to explore the idea that both the archive and repertoire are important factors in exploring
the habits of a community.
This paper will outline Taylor’s ideas, and place her work within a comparative American and Welsh
Performance Studies tradition, discussing relevant ideas by academics such as Richard Schechner, Dwight
Conquergood, Mike Pearson and J.R Jones. It will discuss the need to understand the performative acts
17
Thomas Jones, in Evan Price, Cewri’r Pulpud, p. 192
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
38
of a community as repertoire, and that the continuation of repertoire is all-important in the survival of
that community.
It will discuss this idea in the context of my doctoral research, in which I worked with three Welsh
chapels to produce reflexive performances. These performances enabled me to witness the importance
of the repertoire as a way of knowing which invigorates and redefines the communities’ values. I will
argue that the repertoire, although sometimes under-valued as a way of knowing, can be a way of
uncovering new histories. As Diana Taylor puts it:
If, however, we were to reorient the ways social memory and cultural identity in the Americas
have been studied, with the disciplinary emphasis on literary and historical documents, and look
through the lens of performed, embodied behaviours, what would we know that we do not know
now? Whose stories, memories, and struggles might become visible? What tensions might
performance behaviours show that would not be recognized in texts and documents? (The
Archive and the Repertoire, 2003, p. Xviii)
“That’s not bloody true, I’m as Welsh as anybody”: The Continuum of Welshness and
Basqueness and its Implications for the Development of a National Consciousness
Sophie Williams, Swansea University
The contentious nature of national identity has been well-documented; the difficulties and challenges
associated with self-understanding in a ‘stateless nation’ context having undergone profound scholarly
exploration. Yet the accepted multiplicity of the same nominal identity often masks the hard truths: that
it is plausible that certain nation members continue to rank each other on a continuum of national
identity, whereby some people are considered more or less worthy of holding that identity than others.
This paper explores this concept in relation to Wales and the Basque Country; having firstly situated this
phenomenon within the relevant theoretical context, it subsequently explores the analytical purchase of
this concept through examination of focus group discussion in both nations. Finally, it considers the
consequences of such a sliding scale of identity for national unity, in particular its implications for the
ongoing development of a coherent national consciousness.
NAASWCH 2016 ABSTRACTS | @NAASWCH16
39