Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Literature and Culture

(Paperback)

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A study of human and animal encounters in Welsh literature.

This book is the first study of the representation of animals, animality, and human-nonhuman encounters in modern Welsh literature and culture. Drawing on new approaches to animal studies, Linden Peach grounds his analysis in the insight that all living things are connected. Through fresh readings of Welsh literature, periodicals, and manuals, Animals, Animality and Controversy in Modern Welsh Writing and Culture explores how the history of Wales might be reimagined from the perspective of animals.

Reviews

"'The pig is a friend' wrote the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, and Linden Peach's richly knowledgeable and engagingly written book offers the ideal introduction to the many, deep and deeply ambivalent relationships with animals that populate Welsh literature. Drawing on key themes in animal studies, and connecting deft analysis of specific portrayals of animals to cultural and ecological knowledges about them, the book reveals for the first time that the most innovative contemporary ideas about humans' relations with animals are profoundly expressed in Welsh literary traditions. This is a most exciting and important addition to literary animal studies."-- "Robert McKay, co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature"
"An alert and wide-ranging contribution to our understanding of the 'entangled empathies', complex dependencies and multiple environments (natural, agricultural, industrial and domestic) of human-animal relations in Wales's imaginative writing. Peach's study is eloquent in its respect for animal subjectivities and humbling in its rebuke of human exceptionalism."-- "Damian Walford Davies, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of English Literature, Cardiff University"

Author Bio

Linden Peach is director of educational development at the Prince's School of Traditional Arts, London, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a fellow of the English Association.