[Pictured above: Conference Organizer Dr. Katie Gramich, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University]
ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2008
The focus of the twentieth annual conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English at Gregynog Hall in Powys, Wales, UK from April 4-6, 2008 will be ‘On The Edge: Margins and Peripheries in Welsh Writing.’
The theme is open to a range of interpretations, both literal and symbolic.
On the literal (littoral?) level, Welsh writers have long been engaged in representing the coastline and islands of Wales, from Allen Raine’s Cardiganshire cliffs and caves to Dylan Thomas’s Rhossili and the marginal estuary town of Under Milk Wood . . .
More recently, Brenda Chamberlain and Christine Evans have provided powerful poetic accounts of living on the edge in Bardsey Island, while R. S. Thomas spent his later years probing life out on the limb of the Llŷn peninsula.
Other writers, like Emyr Humphreys and Kate Roberts, have seen Wales on the uncomfortable edge of Empire, while many Welsh works, like Raymond Williams’s Border Country, have explored the liminal spaces between nations, and between the rural and the industrial.
International artistic movements are often interpreted differently by writers of ‘marginal’ status, such as the Welsh Modernism of Glyn Jones or the Anglo-Welsh Romanticism of Felicia Hemans or Ann of Swansea.
Welsh identities, too have frequently been represented as edgy and fractured, such as in the multiple selves projected in the work of David Jones, Dannie Abse, or Charlotte Williams.
More recently, Welsh writers have explored cultural, ethnic and linguistic margins in productive experiments with form and symbolism, as in the writing of Lloyd Jones, Gwyneth Lewis, or Peter Ho Davies.
This conference will be an opportunity to explore the various edges of Welsh writing: those places where the self comes up against the something else which, arguably, defines it as what it is.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited on any aspect of the theme ‘On The Edge: Margins and Peripheries in Welsh Writing.’
Both short papers (c. 20 minutes) or longer ones (c. 50 minutes) will be considered; a brief abstract should be submitted to the organizer for consideration by the deadline of December 14th, 2007.
Organizer: Dr. Katie Gramich, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU. Email: GramichK@cf.ac.uk;
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