Fragments of Union Blog

A new undergraduate module here at Swansea, Fragments of Union: The Cultural Making and Breaking of Britain (taught by CREW's dynamic duo, Professor Daniel Williams and Dr Kieron Smith), has its very own blog. I'd encourage you all to have a read- it's likely to be a great resource not just for students of this course, but for anyone interested in a four-nations approach to literature and history. Happy reading! https://fragmentsofunion.wordpress.com/

AWWE 2015: The Country and the City Conference Details

Registration is now open for what looks like an absolute corker of a conference- register by the 10th March! Contact the organisers, Dr Aidan Byrne and Prof Diana Wallace at awwe15@awwe.org for more information. Full programme below:

 

 

AWWE 2015 ‘The Country and the City: Rural and Urban Wales’

Conference Programme

 

 

Friday 27 March

2.00-5.00 Registration

 

2.30pm            AWWE Annual Business Meeting (Library) All Welcome.

 

4-5pm                         Tea/coffee (Blayney Room)

 

5-7pm              Welcome Drinks (Senior Common Room)

                        Award of M. Wynn Thomas Essay prize

Honno Books Showcase: chair Jane Aaron.

My Mother’s House, by Lily Tobias, with an introduction by Jasmine Donahaye (Honno) and The Greatest Need: The creative life and troubled times of Lily Tobias, a Welsh Jew in Palestine by Jasmine Donahaye (Honno)

Poetry reading and conversation: Sally Roberts Jones

                       

7-8                  Dinner

 

8.15pm            Keynote Lecture 1 (Seminar Room 1)

Chair: M. Wynn Thomas

Professor Helen Fulton (Bristol University),

                   ‘Arthur in Caerleon: Remembering a Roman City in the Literature of Wales’

 

Saturday 28 March

8.00-9.15         Breakfast

 

9.30-11am       Parallel Sessions

                        Panel Session 1:  Raymond Williams I

Chair: Daniel Williams

Yasuo Kawabata (Japan Women’s University), ‘Orwell, Raymond Williams and “Double Vision”: A Reading of Loyalties’

Shintaro Kono (Hitotsubashi University, Japan), ‘Beyond ‘“Developmental Narratives”: Virginia Woolf, Emyr Humphreys and Haruki Murakami’

                        Ugo Rivetti (University of Sao Paulo, Brazil), ‘Literature and Capitalism in

                        Raymond Williams’ The Country and The City’

 

Panel Session 2: The Urban and the Industrial

Daniel Hughes (Bangor University), ‘“At the hand of the mangle”: Urban Modernism and Meaninglessness in Gwyn Thomas’s Oscar’

Alexandra Jones (Swansea University), ‘Deformed Landscape, Disabled Industry: Disability in South Wales Coalfields Literature’

Daryl Leeworthy (Cardiff University), ‘Making Room for Jesters: Male Sexuality, Class, and the Urban in the Writing of Ron Berry and Stead Jones’

 

11-11.30am     Coffee (Blayney Room/ Dining Room)

 

11.30-1pm       Parallel sessions

Panel Session 3: Raymond Williams II

Malcolm Ballin, ‘”A Kind of Fall”: Some Welsh Perspectives from The Country and The City’

David JG Barnes (University of South Wales), ‘Raymond Williams and contemporary realist art practice’

Steve Hendon (Cardiff University), ‘An emotional ‘border crossed’: industrialised masculinities in Gwyn Thomas’s All Things Betray Thee (1949) and Raymond Williams’s Border Country (1960)’ 

 

Panel Session 4: Landscapes of Ceredigion/ Cardiganshire

Jayne Bowden (University of South Wales), ‘“The Devil’s Grandmother’s Jointure”: Elisabeth Inglis-Jones’ Gothic Wales’

Alan Vaughan Jones (Independent Scholar) ‘Representations of Ceredigion in Alun Lewis’s ‘Dwellers in the Valley’ and Idris Davies’s ‘Teify Side’

Kate Woodward (Aberystwyth University) ‘Noiring the Picturesque: the discovery and abandonment of landscape in Hinterland / Y Gwyll’

 

1-2                   Lunch

 

2-3                   Centenary Panel: Caradoc Evans, My People (1915) (Seminar Room 1)

Chair: Kirsti Bohata

Dinah Jones, an award-winning programme maker, will talk about her documentary film Caradoc Evans A’i Bobl (S4C) with M. Wynn Thomas and Mary-Ann Constantine

 

3-4                   Parallel sessions

Panel Session 5: Short fictions                    

Jane Aaron (University of South Wales), ‘Hiraeth and the Pastoral in the Welsh Short Story in English’

Michelle Deininger (Cardiff Metropolitan University), ‘“Ugly cracks against the sky”: rural landscapes and the politics of disease in the short fiction of Elizabeth Baines’

 

Panel Session 6: Rural fictions                                 

Georgia Burdett (CREW/ Swansea University), 'Bobbing along a sea of urbanism: the rural fiction of Cynan Jones'

Lisa Sheppard (Cardiff University), ‘“Escape to the Country”’ or into the Heart of Darkness?: “Going Native” in Joe Dunthorne’s Wild Abandon (2011)’

 

4-4.30              Tea (Blayney Room/ Dining Room)

 

4.30-5.30         Keynote Lecture 2 (Seminar Room 1)

Chair: Aidan Byrne

Ed Thomas, film maker, title tbc

 

5.30-6.30         Parallel sessions                       

Panel Session 7:  R.S. Thomas and the rural

Ceri Subbe (Bangor University) ‘From Iago to Ianto: How the Welsh peasant lost the voice it never had’

Andrew Webb (Bangor University), ‘Post-rural, post-urban space in R.S. Thomas’

 

Panel Session 8: Village life and country ‘folk’

Catriona Coutts (Bangor University), ‘The Influence of the Gwerin Writers on the Work of Rhys Davies’

Liz Jones (Aberystwyth University), ‘Performing the Language of the Grotesque: The “malignant beauty” of Caradoc Evans’ Taffy’                  

 

7-8                   Dinner

 

8.15-9.15         Creative Keynote (Seminar Room 1)

Chair: Diana Wallace

Professor Christopher Meredith (University of South Wales)

                        'I'r Bur Hoff Bau'

 

 

Sunday 29 March

8.00-9.30         Breakfast

 

9.30-11            Parallel sessions

Panel Session 9 : Curious travellers: travel writing and tourism

Mary-Ann Constantine (University of Wales, CAWCS),  ‘“Mountain-plants brought into a stove”:  Country and City in Catherine Hutton’s The Welsh Mountaineer (1817)’

Elizabeth Edwards (University of Wales, CAWCS) ‘”[S]eventeen different processes”: Mary Brunton’s border crossings’

Rita Singer (Prifysgol Bangor University), ‘German Travel Writing in Search of the Poet as a Bohemian Dropout’

 

Panel Session 10: Post-devolution gender and place

Emma Schofield (Cardiff University), ‘Returning to Ground Level: Rediscovering Rural, Urban and Coastal Spaces in Stevie Davies’ Kith and Kin and Erica Woof’s Mud Puppy’

Robert Walton (Cardiff University), ‘The ruralisation of gender relationships in the novels of Trezza Azzopardi’

Rhiannon Heledd Williams (University of South Wales), ‘Local or National? Gender, place and identity in post-devolution Wales’ literature’           

 

11.11.30          Coffee (Blayney Room)

 

11.30 -1pm      Parallel sessions

Panel Session 11: Re/inhabiting the rural

Siriol McAvoy, (Cardiff University), ‘“My mother gave me a pure white book with thick leaves and in it I pressed wild flowers”: Lynette Roberts, neo-Romanticism, and gendered re-visions of national identity’

Rosie Milnes (Bangor University), ‘A geocritical re-examination of Brenda Chamberlain’s Tide Race’

Sarah Morse, (CREW), ‘Reinhabiting the Rhondda: Reading Ron Berry as an Eco-Centric Writer’

 

Panel Session 12: City and Country

Jessica George (Cardiff University), ‘“The unknown region that lies beyond the Gray’s Inn Road”: Evolutionary anxiety in the country and the city in Arthur Machen’s The Green Round

Sally Roberts Jones, ‘THE LITERATURE OF WALES: City and Country’

Shan Morgain (University of Swansea), ‘Mabinogi Man: a structural analysis of town and country portraits’

 

1-2pm                         Lunch and departure