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

In Emyr Humphreys' classic novel J.T. Miles reflects on a life of mis-steps, over-ambition and betrayal. He contemplates the modern world (of which he feels no part), his attempts to bring about social change and his inability to pass on love. It has been a life of drama and defeat; a life mirroring the fate of his country in the twentieth century. New Edition.

The 5th in a series, this work conveys the conflicts and passions of a small group of individuals in Wales, weighing them against the turmoil caused by war and its effects on a significantly changing Britain.

The book is the first overview of the long distinguished career of Wales’ leading Welsh-language novelist in its entirety. • A study of Emyr Humphreys who has had a remarkable career spanning over seventy years as a writer, he has published more than two dozen novels (many of them prize-winning), as well as several collection of short stories. • These essays were supplemented by the interviews the author conducted with Emyr Humphreys.

Emyr Humphreys is a major figure in twentieth-century writing and The Woman at the Window is an immensely enjoyable and impressive addition to his outstanding list of award-winning novels and short stories. From the widow alone in the rectory drawing room to views across the sunny expanses of post-war Europe, celebrated writer Emyr Humphreys offers this urbane, mature collection. His protagonists look back over the patterns of their lives and forward too, for the chance to untangle family relationships, rekindle lost loves, or find a home for themselves in familiar yet fresh surroundings.

A Toy Epic is the story of three boys moving towards the threshold of adult life in the 1930s. From differing backgrounds their lives cross and touch until they become firm friends. Each of them, Michael, Albie and Iorwerth, take up the story in turn, creating their own particular world and contriubting to the composite picture of life in 'one of the four corners of Wales'. Significantly, A Toy Epic is Wales' most important war novel, the dominant central theme of the book. It is framed by the two World Wars, and their shadows, one gone and one looming, colour the novel dark. War is the ultimate representation in the book of a dilemma: that war, although a threat to the existence of civilisation, can also advance it. A Toy Epic is Wales' shining example of modernism. Humphreys, in this book at least, is a modernist in the exact sense of the word. He experiments with form (in the footsteps of Woolf - in particular The Waves which folds an avuncular arm around A Toy Epic from beginning to end), but also he is conducting these experiments at the fault lines of fear and exaltation that the early part of the twentieth century inspired in its artists. A Toy Epic is a marvellous example of modernist techniques employed to condense the reading experience whilst opening up the riches of the prose's potential. It is also a very moving story of three boys growing up, about childhood, and Welsh childhood specifically, between the wars; it is about church versus chapel, about class, about different types of masculine identity, about prospects, about sex, marriage and about death. As M. Wynn Thomas points out in his full and excellent introduction to this edition, the boys represent the polarities at work in Wales during the time; the anglicanisation of Wales from without and within, the erosion of tradition, the significant internal migrations to the coast. Seldom has the country been so tellingly portrayed.

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

• Emyr Humphreys is arguably Wales’s most distinguished living writer. • Hidden amongst the detritus gathered during the creative process these poems were not intended to be read generally but were private thoughts distilled into the shard like fragments described in the title. • The poems show the depth and variety of his thinking, with a cutting insight into the nature of being and its universal significance, insignificance or relevance. • The poems contain a profundity which challenge us to think more deeply about the nature of our being.

"How Green Was My Valley" is Richard Llewellyn's bestselling -- and timeless -- classic and the basis of a beloved film. As Huw Morgan is about to leave home forever, he reminisces about the golden days of his youth when South Wales still prospered, when coal dust had not yet blackened the valley. Drawn simply and lovingly, with a crisp Welsh humor, Llewellyn's characters fight, love, laugh and cry, creating an indelible portrait of a people.

Throughout contemporary British writing, the question of national identity recurs. By means of its testimony to lived experience, the novel seems to offer the possibility of exploring local communities and marginalized identities in various elaborate ways. However, by its very metropolitanism, and as a result of the material circumstances of publishing and the cosmopolitan nature of the audience, the British novel inevitably conglomerates around London, and its exploration of the remainder of Britain has tended to be patchy and touristy.