'Wee wenhonourGhosetrayn': The spectres of Modern Welsh Writing in English

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Welsh anglophone writers are living with ghosts. The 'ghosetrayn' at the fair in Stephen Knight's 'The Heart of Saturday Night' traverses the shared common ('cawmun') of the community: its colloquial phonetic spelling lingers between the English and Welsh language, the activity of the young narrator vacillates between childish innocence and grim adult experience. Characterised variously as 'Post-Industrial', 'Post-Communal', 'Post-Pastoral' and 'Post-National', anglophone Welsh writing likewise hovers in an intangible cultural space. Modern Welsh writing in English thus takes on the guise of a literature haunted by the spectres of its past socioeconomic and cultural condition while also anticipating future identities and formations. My research project examines the spectral qualities of Welsh literature written in English from 1990-present investigating the questions of lack, loss and instability such writing raises, and how anglophone Welsh literature challenges, extends and refutes existing conceptions of spectral theory. Simultaneously, spectral theory facilitates the theorisation of such literature in terms of its capacity to interrogate the socioeconomic and socio-political status of contemporary Wales. My project has a four-chapter structure, organising works by the broad categories described above. Crucially, the works of the authors I will study are located in the tumultuous period which marked the closure of Welsh heavy industry, the introduction and aftermath of devolution and the reintroduction of the Welsh language to Wales as part of a largescale Welsh Government project: a period which is as much about loss and decline as it is about birth and formation. Each chapter has one author who is the chapter's main focus, but will identify other anglophone Welsh writers whose work testifies to new trends emerging in the field. Like the industrial society to which it responded, industrial fiction has been one of the dominant modes of Welsh writing in the twentieth century. The tropes of trauma, disability and deracination encountered in the contemporary works of Christopher Meredith describe a post-industrial moment haunted by the spectres of a departed industrial world and the society sustained by it. Following on, my second chapter investigates what I term 'Post-Communal' literature which encompasses both the turbulent 'coming-of-age' novels of Joe Dunthorne. I examine the ways in which the Welsh identity is becoming increasingly fragmented and individualist, rather than maintaining the community-oriented feeling of anglophone Welsh literatures past. The third chapter of the project theorises traumatic and violent 'Post-Pastoral' works of Niall Griffiths, investigating not just the position of rural areas of Wales within an increasingly urbanised conception of national identity, but the ways in which the decline of the Welsh rural economy threatens a particular Welsh way of life dependent on that economy. My fourth chapter deals with the 'Post-National'; I intend to engage with plays by Peter Gill in order to explore the ways in which works by Welsh writers set outside of Wales are haunted by the spectres of Welsh culture. I ask if such writing can be conceived of as 'non-Welsh writing in English': does the spectre of a popular stereotypical Welsh identity, rooted in the industrial, the communal, the pastoral and the national, haunt these works? Ultimately, this thesis argues contemporary Welsh writing in English is haunted by loss: of industry, the community, the pastoral landscape, and the nation as distinct from English ways of life.