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Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare

Critical Essays to Mark the Centenary of the Writer's Birth

Editor(s) Meic Stephens

Paperback - £18.99

Language: English

Genre(s): Welsh Interest

October 2001 · 240 pages ·216x138mm

· Paperback - 9780708316948

About The Book

Rhys Davies (1901-1978) dedicated his life entirely to writing and is now generally regarded as one of the most prolific and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers in English. In addition to writing over one hundred short stories, his many novels included The Withered Root (1927), The Black Venus (1944) and The Perishable Quality (1957). While he has long been thought of as a master of the short story form, his novels are now considered to be among the finest written by a Welsh writer in English and a critical re-assessment of his career is long overdue. Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare contains essays on the major aspects of Rhys Davies's life and work, from the literary, social and national contexts within which he wrote to issues of gender, sexuality and race. Published to mark the centenary of Rhys Davies's birth, Decoding the Hare is the first substantial study of his work and will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth-century Welsh writing in English and in this complex and elusive writer in particular.

Endorsements

'...this volume offers a rich variety of critical approaches to the work a writer of undeniable importance to Anglo-Welsh literature...an engaging and lively critical contribution to Welsh writing in English.' New Welsh Review

Meic Stephens [Glamorgan] Introduction Dai Smith [BBC Wales] Rhys Davies and his 'Turbulent Valley' Michael J. Dixon [postgrad, Glamorgan] The Epic Rhondda: Romanticism and Realism in the Rhondda Trilogy Stephen Knight [Professor of English, Cardiff] 'Not a Place for Me': Rhys Davies's Fiction and the Coal Industry Tony Brown [Bangor] 'The Memory of Lost Countries': Rhys Davies's Wales Daniel Williams [Swansea] Withered Roots: Ideas of Race in the Work of Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence Barbara Prys-Williams [postgrad, Swansea] Rhys Davies as Autobiographer: Hare or Houdini? D. A. Callard [-] 'One rainy Sunday afternoon...' J. Lawrence Mitchell [Professor of English, Texas A&M University] 'I wish I had a Trumpet': Rhys Davies and the Creative Impulse Linden Peach [Professor of English, Loughborough University] Eccentricity and Lawlessness in the Stories of Rhys Davies Jeff Wallace [Glamorgan] Lawrentianisms: Rhys Davies and D. H. Lawrence James A. Davies [formerly Swansea] 'Love and the need of it': Three Novels Katie Gramich [Open University] The Masquerade of Gender in the Stories of Rhys Davies Jane Aaron [Professor of English, Glamorgan] Daughters of Darkness: Rhys Davies's Revenge Tragedies Kirsti Bohata [postgrad, Swansea] The Black Venus Simon Baker and Joanna Furber [Swansea, SB is Lecturer, JF is postgrad] 'Unspeakable Rites': Writing the Unspeakable M. Wynn Thomas [Professor of English, Swansea] 'Never seek to tell thy love': Rhys Davies's Fiction

About the Editor(s)

Author(s): Meic Stephens

Meic Stephens is a freelance author, editor and journalist. Among the reference works he has compiled and edited are The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales (1986) and A Dictionary of Literary Quotations (1990), and he is also an editor of the Writers of Wales series.