A Ride Through the Wood

Roland Mathias
In collecting these essays Roland Mathias uses for his subjects the symbol of a wood, virtually unexplored, and until recently considered to be on the edge of the map of English literature. Mathias, as he puts it, is in "possession of a different map, one on which the wood appears much closer to the centre", and A Ride Through the Wood is an unusual selection of essays on Anglo-Welsh writers by a critic who shares their particular background and is knowledgeable about it. Mathias acts as a native guide to writers ranging from Henry Vaughan in the seventeenth century to his contemporaries R.S.Thomas and Emyr Humphreys. In between he takes in major writers such as David Jones, Vernon Watkins, Dylan Thomas and Alun Lewis, and provides essays on Under Milk Wood and the Caseg Broadsheets, the wartime publishing venture behind which Alun Lewis was the prime mover. There is, in addition, a survey of Anglo-Welsh poets in the nineteenth century, when the English language began a rapid and irreversible penetration of Wales, and a "glance" at Anglo-Welsh magazines, the nurseries of so many writers, which amounts to a brief history of them. Moving from writer to individual work to historical survey, Mathias offers not only many valuable insights into the writers themselves, but also into the broad background of English language writing in Wales. A Ride Through the Wood represent a major selection of the work from the last dozen years by an inquisitive scholar and the doyen of Anglo-Welsh critics.

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More Publication details

ISBN : 0907476503  Pages : 320
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