Table of Contents Introduction
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Table of Contents Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 3 Part One: Resistant and Conservative Welsh Spaces .............................................................. 9 Chapter One: Mapping the ‘Real’: The Spatial Turn, and Psychogeography in Wales ........... 9 The Spatial Turn ....................................................................................................................... 10 Geocriticism and Critical Literary Geography .......................................................................... 16 Post-Devolution Thirdspace ..................................................................................................... 28 Literary Geography and Literary Tourism in Wales ................................................................. 35 Chapter Two: ‘Going native’: Jan Morris and Devolutionary Wales ..................................... 44 Patriotism, Nationalism, and a Brief Note on Patagonia ......................................................... 49 Jan Morris and Utopia .............................................................................................................. 58 The Utopian Impulse ................................................................................................................ 65 Welsh Writing: Political and Literary Utopias .......................................................................... 71 Machynlleth: Capital of Utopian Wales ................................................................................... 77 Our First Leader and a New Landsker ...................................................................................... 82 Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere: Morris, Utopia, and Colonial Discourse ...................... 92 Hav and Ethnicity ................................................................................................................... 101 Jan Morris: Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 108 Chapter Three: Iain Sinclair: ‘We’re in political Wales now’ ............................................... 111 Devolution and Funding in Landor’s Tower ........................................................................... 123 Sinclair’s Welsh Publication History ....................................................................................... 127 Paratexts ................................................................................................................................ 131 ‘The Mabinogi of Shame’ ....................................................................................................... 156 South Wales Valleys and Industrial Decline ........................................................................... 170 Autobiography and the Archive ............................................................................................. 173 The Gower of Thomas is not the Gower of Watkins ............................................................. 178 The (Bankable) Heritage Industry .......................................................................................... 183 Part Two: Literature Since Devolution ................................................................................. 190 Chapter Four: Literary Devolution in Context ...................................................................... 190 Overview of Devolution in Wales and the UK ....................................................................... 194 Devolution in a UK Context .................................................................................................... 197 Welsh Writing in English Since Devolution ............................................................................ 205 Literary Culture in Wales After Devolution ........................................................................... 209 Chapter Five: Seren’s New Stories from the Mabinogion.................................................... 224 The Myth is Not the Territory: Funding Landscapes ............................................................. 224 Retelling Myths in Post-Devolution Britain ........................................................................... 225 Recent Work on the Mabinogion and Landscape ................................................................. 232 The Contemporary Welsh Funding Landscape ...................................................................... 237 The Mabinogion in the Twentieth Century ........................................................................... 243 Afterwords ............................................................................................................................. 245 The Meat Tree ........................................................................................................................ 247 The White Trail ....................................................................................................................... 251 Fountainville ........................................................................................................................... 256 The Real Geography of The Ninth Wave ................................................................................ 262 The Dreams of Max and Ronnie ............................................................................................. 270 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 282 Chapter Six: Devolving the ‘Real’ Wales: Rendering Space in Practice and Theory ........... 284 The Western Mail’s ‘Divided’ Map, 22 September 1997 ....................................................... 288 Dennis Balsom’s ‘Three Wales Model’ .................................................................................. 288 The Real Series and its Contemporaries ................................................................................ 304 Real Photography and the Subversion of Aesthetics ............................................................ 311 De-bordering Debord’s Psychogeography ............................................................................. 313 Fiction in the Real Series ........................................................................................................ 319 Countermapping the ‘Real’ .................................................................................................... 326 A Real Prose Poem ................................................................................................................. 329 Real Capitalism ....................................................................................................................... 335 The Real Series beyond Wales ............................................................................................... 336 Coda ....................................................................................................................................... 342 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................. 345 Redefining Space .................................................................................................................... 347 Devolutionary Style ................................................................................................................ 350 Funding .................................................................................................................................. 351 The Gospel of Us and the Future of Devolution and Writing in Wales .................................. 353 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 3578 Introduction The truth has lately been / Welsh and smoke-laden and endlessly local (J.H. Prynne, ‘A New Tax on the Counter-earth’, 1971) Devolution has had a clear impact on contemporary literary production in Wales. To ascertain the specific ways in which literature has been affected by the discourse of devolution, requires an interdisciplinary approach, one that takes into account the ways in which literature can be affected by a complex and still unfolding political event.i While a political scientist might be able to explore a counterfactual approach to devolution, that is, what might have happened were the referendum, held on 18 September 1997, to have returned a different result, literary criticism has no such comparable recourse. As such, any attempt to identify or extricate which of the observable changes in literature in Wales might not have occurred were the 1997 devolution referendum to have returned a different result is problematic.ii So, while it might be interesting to discuss what might have been were the referendum to have returned a different result, this thesis will attempt to focus on the specific changes that have occurred both as a direct consequence of devolution, such as structural changes to the funding and marketing of Welsh literature, as well as more indirect i See ‘The history of Welsh devolution’, National Assembly for Wales [website] <http://www.assembly.wales/en/abthome/role-of-assembly-how-it-works/Pages/history- welsh-devolution.aspx> ii Literature might function as a discourse that can explore counterfactual and alternate histories, such as in Jan Morris’s Machynlleth Triad (discussed