Canolfan Richard Burton * Academi Rhodri Morgan * CREW
Seminar Series / Cyfres Seminarau 2017 - 18
Welsh Europeanisms
Ewropaethau Cymreig
Literature. Politics. History
Llenyddiaeth. Gwleidyddiaeth. Hanes
4pm, Monday, October 30, Keir Hardie Building. Room 115
4yh, Dydd Llun, Hydref 30, Adeilad Keir Hardie, Ystafell 115
Siriol McAvoy, Research Fellow, CREW
"I felt like running off to France and selling
my British status”: Lynette Roberts, Welsh modernism, and the call of Europe
Argentinian-Welsh poet Lynette Roberts tends to be identified with a
‘localist’ strand of modernism, rooted in her ‘milltir sgwâr’ of Llanybri,
Carmarthenshire. But she can also be seen as an
‘international-regionalist’, for her writing seeks continuously to open up the
borders of Wales to other times and spaces. In this paper, I address Roberts’s
engagement with the cultures of Europe, suggesting that this illuminates her
own fluid, multifarious sense of belonging as a ‘colonial’ (and Welsh) woman
writer.
Firstly I excavate Roberts's internationalism and
solidarity with Europe in the context of the socio-political developments that
marked the 1930s and 40s, including the rise of Fascism. Summarising the importance
of her ‘continental migrations to Europe’ around this time, I turn to consider her
engagement with the European avant-garde (Symbolist theatre, Surrealism,
modernist design including Bauhaus and Le Corbusier). The third part of the
paper will examine Roberts's interest in (what she sees as a) trans-European
folk culture. Presenting her support for 'peasant' peoples and
the rural dispossessed as indicative of her feminist and culturalist vision, I
suggest that she fuses Welsh and European folk culture
with avant-garde aesthetics in order to construct a new form of
‘naive modernism’ that champions a cultural rootedness without borders.
