Kirsti Bohata

• Professor at Swansea University

This chapter focuses on Welsh fiction. Realism has dominated the Welsh novel, from the working-class novels of the 1930s onwards, and it remains an important, perhaps limiting form, although there has been a good deal of experimentation within this broad category. What is notable about the post-devolution wave of novels is the increasing number of...

This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland […] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on...

The relationship between mistress and maid is curiously intimate yet bounded by class. Employers and their servants are caught in a dynamic of dominance and submission, in which they practice mutual surveillance. Yet the relationship may also evoke models of loyalty, devotion, and the possibility, in fiction at least, of female alliance. On the com...

From the beginning of the genre, women writers have made a major contribution to the development of industrial writing. Although prevented from gaining first-hand experience of the coalface, Welsh women writers were amongst the first to try to fictionalize those heavy industries—coal and metal in the south, and slate in the north—which dominated th...

This statistical compendium gives information about accidents and injuries in the British coal industry from 1780 to 1948. It provides in tabular form statistics about the occurrence of non-fatal accidents, and various welfare and medical responses. It was produced as part of a Wellcome Trust Programme Grant in Medical History, 'Disability and Indu...

Wales was a Welsh‐speaking country with a significant English‐speaking minority, including an anglicized gentry. Historical novels, short tales or “sketches,” and romances were important forms throughout the Victorian period. Toward the end of the century, a nascent industrial fiction emerged depicting life in the coal and iron industries. Translat...

Castles, houses and ruins are paradigmatic tropes of Gothic writing, ubiquitous and multivalent signifiers from its inception to the present. Family, ‘race’ and nation are evoked by the sense of the word house meaning ‘lineage’, making houses emblematic of nation. Houses are also used figuratively in Female Gothic writing to encode and deconstruct...

With a few notable exceptions, Wales has generally been portrayed as an overtly patriarchal nation, the haven of anti-suffragists. The first part of this article reassesses this reputation. It is argued that national as well as local historical specificities must be taken into account in order to achieve a more accurate representation of suffrage h...

Postcolonialism Revisited is a ground-breaking book, the first to explore and analyse Anglophone Welsh writing, both literary and otherwise, in the context of contemporary thinking about colonial and post-colonial cultures. Kirsti Bohata considers how far the paradigms of postcolonial theory may be usefully adopted and adapted to provide an illumin...