Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
13 - The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Texts
- Introduction
- 1 Early-Modern Diversity: The Origins of English Short Fiction
- 2 Short Prose Narratives of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
- 3 Gothic and Victorian Supernatural Tales
- 4 The Victorian Potboiler: Novelists Writing Short Stories
- 5 Fable, Myth and Folk Tale: The Writing of Oral and Traditional Story Forms
- 6 The Colonial Short Story, Adventure and the Exotic
- 7 The Yellow Book Circle and the Culture of the Literary Magazine
- 8 The Modernist Short Story: Fractured Perspectives
- 9 War Stories: The Short Story in the First and Second World Wars
- 10 The Short Story in Ireland to 1945: A National Literature
- 11 The Short Story in Ireland since 1945: A Modernizing Tradition
- 12 The Short Story in Scotland: From Oral Tale to Dialectal Style
- 13 The Short Story in Wales: Cultivated Regionalism
- 14 The Understated Art, English Style
- 15 The Rural Tradition in the English Short Story
- 16 Metropolitan Modernity: Stories of London
- 17 Gender and Genre: Short Fiction, Feminism and Female Experience
- 18 Queer Short Stories: An Inverted History
- 19 Stories of Jewish Identity: Survivors, Exiles and Cosmopolitans
- 20 New Voices: Multicultural Short Stories
- 21 Settler Stories: Postcolonial Short Fiction
- 22 After Empire: Postcolonial Short Fiction and the Oral Tradition
- 23 Ghost Stories and Supernatural Tales
- 24 The Detective Story: Order from Chaos
- 25 Frontiers: Science Fiction and the British Marketplace
- 26 Weird Stories: The Potency of Horror and Fantasy
- 27 Experimentalism: Self-Reflexive and Postmodernist Stories
- 28 Satirical Stories: Estrangement and Social Critique
- 29 Comedic Short Fiction
- 30 Short Story Cycles: Between the Novel and the Story Collection
- 31 The Novella: Between the Novel and the Story
- 32 The Short Story Visualized: Adaptations and Screenplays
- 33 The Short Story Anthology: Shaping the Canon
- 34 The Institution of Creative Writing
- 35 Short Story Futures
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Wales in its entirety is not the ‘region’ to which this chapter heading refers. ‘The term “region” usually designates a patch of geography, the borders of which do not correspond to the borders of an individual country’, as Wendy Griswold puts it in her recent study of literary regionalism. Cairns Craig has pointed out in relation to Scotland that it is only from the centralized perspective of the English literary tradition that all Scottish regional fictions, dealing as they do with a diversity of Scottish geographical ‘patches’, can be seen as the product of one region, and the same is true also of Wales. Welsh short stories frequently manifest many of the features which Griswold lists as characteristic of regional writing: they too tend to focus on the representation of particularized Welsh locations, and on the nature of the human experience forged within those places by their specific history. Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, however, regions in north, south, east and west Wales have differed markedly from one another as shifting patterns of agrarian blight, industrial development, population migrations and economic depression affected their communities. Anthologists have frequently drawn attention to the fact that Welsh short stories portray ‘not one Wales, but many’. Alun Richards introducing his Penguin anthologies stressed the distinguishing importance of ‘the varied backgrounds against which the stories are set’, and in his 1993 collection went so far as to ‘arrange them accordingly rather than in any chronological order’. More recently, other anthologists have chosen to focus on one region alone; Dewi Roberts’ Heartland (2005), for example, confines itself to tales from north-western Wales, while Lewis Davies's Urban Welsh (2005) focuses predominantly on urban south Wales.
Another feature of the Welsh short story is, however, frequently referred to by its anthologists as a characteristic element, common across its regional diversities. Introducing his Faber collection in 1959, George Ewart Evans sees the genre as having ‘flowered during a period of acute social stress’. The communities depicted, whether labouring on the green hilltops of Cardiganshire, the slate mountains of Gwynedd, or underground in the coal pits of Glamorganshire, all inspired short story writing during otherwise disastrous epochs in their history, when they faced economic collapse.
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- The Cambridge History of the English Short Story , pp. 219 - 234Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016