Locating Lynette Roberts

Always Observant and Slightly Obscure'

Edited by Siriol McAvoy

Publication date:

01 April 2019

Length of book:

288 pages

Publisher

University of Wales Press

Dimensions:

216x138mm

ISBN-13: 9781786833822

BOOK DESCRIPTION
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing – for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between the colours, mythologies and landscapes of the two countries and, in so doing, poses a series of important questions: where, and what, is home? How do we inhabit a particular time and place? This volume of essays brings together for the first time some of the most important research on Roberts’s work that has emerged since the landmark republication of her Collected Poems in 2005. Written by a range of prominent scholars, writers and poets, each essay strives in some way to ‘place’ Roberts, analysing the environments to which her writing responds and teasing out the interwoven skeins of her national, cultural and political affiliations. Together, they pinpoint key concerns in Roberts’s elusive, haunting work, and define her original contribution to twentieth-century literary culture.

Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Locating Lynette Roberts: ‘always observant and slightly obscure’- Siriol McAvoy 1. The Scarlet Woman - M. Wynn Thomas 2. ‘“You have a Welsh name, are you Welsh?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied”’: Lynette Roberts and Elective Welsh Identity - Katie Gramich 3. ‘I remember these things’: Memory, Misrepresentation and Cultural Tradition in Lynette Roberts’s Seven Stories - Michelle Deininger 4. ‘What changes break before us’: Semi-Peripheral Modernity in Lynette Roberts’s Poetry and Prose - Andrew Webb 5. Welsh Literary Modernism, Lynette Roberts, and David Jones: Unearthing ‘a huge and very important culture’ - Daniel Hughes 6. ‘Crusaders uncross limbs by green light of flares’: Lynette Roberts’s Avant-Garde Medievalism - Siriol McAvoy 7. Burnt Pain and Blasted Seashells: Lynette Roberts’s Estuarine War Writing - Leo Mellor 8. Listening and Location in the Poetry of Lynette Roberts - Zoë Skoulding 9. Lynette Roberts’s The Endeavour: A Generic Adventure - Charles Mundye Select Bibliography Index