Machine generated contents note: 1.Humphreys's Life and Works / Emyr Humphreys -- 2.What Kind of Fiction? / Emyr Humphreys -- 3.History, Space and Progress / Emyr Humphreys -- 4.Bodies in Time: Psychoanalytic Contours / Emyr Humphreys -- 5.Women, Feminism and Post-feminism / Emyr Humphreys -- 6.Resistance, Gender and Performative Identity: A Man's Estate / Emyr Humphreys -- 7.Contested Masculinities: A Toy Epic / Emyr Humphreys -- 8.Time and Being: Outside the House of Baal / Emyr Humphreys -- 9.Land of the Living and Epic Theatre / Emyr Humphreys -- 10.Warring Families: Unconditional Surrender and The Gift of a Daughter / Emyr Humphreys -- 11.Strangers in a Strange Land: Natives, Ghosts and Strangers and Old People are a Problem / Emyr Humphreys -- 12.Intimate Strangers: The Shop / Emyr Humphreys -- 13.Independence, Globalism and Nonconformity: The Woman at the Window / Emyr Humphreys -- 14.Afterword / Emyr Humphreys.
Summary
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 twenty-first century. Drawing on the work of leading modern cultural and literary theorists, psychoanalytic critics and gender theorists, 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 post-feminist frameworks. -- Through detailed readings that highlight subjects such as gender identity, contested mascu1nities, 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. -- In its rootedness in north Wales, Humphreys's fiction is seen as providing alternative versions of modern Welsh history to those that have been written by historians and novelists from south Wales and fresh insights into Nonconformity and globalization. The book will appeal to readers wishing to explore and understand the work of one of the most prolific and significant modern Welsh writers. --Book Jacket.
