The module will explore literary and cultural manifestations of Welsh interest in the USA and American interest in Wales. It will be subdivided as follows, with two classes being devoted to each of the sections:

1: American Wales and Welsh anti-Americanism Beginning with the anthropologist Alfred Zimmern’s claim in the early 1920s that the industrial society of South Wales could, because of its cosmopolitanism and industrial dynamism, be called ‘American Wales’, this section will examine the Welsh industrial literature both of the thirties and of the post-war period in the light of such a paradigm (reinforced by the historian Dai Smith in his eighties volume Wales! Wales?). It will also consider an opposite cultural phenomenon – the confirmed antipathy to USA expressed by influential Welsh language writers of the same period, and also present in such anglophone works as Emyr Humphreys’s The Anchor Tree.

2: Wales’s American Dreams In this section, attention will be paid to ways in which Welsh writers in English have constructed images of America in their work. Examples will range from Gwyn Thomas’s The Keep to Ed Thomas’s House of America , Duncan Bush’s Midway, John Davies’s The Visitor’s Book and Des Barry’s The Chivalry of Crime.

3: American Dreams of Wales If John Ford’s film version of How Green Was My Valley represents American romantic interest in Welsh industrial culture, then other literary works such as those based on Medieval Welsh culture (e.g.The Mabinogion) and history, on ‘Celticism’ etc. represent American constructions of an ancient Welsh civilization. And the work of writers such as Jon Dressel, William Vergil Davis and William Greenway display an inwardness with Welsh affairs that make theirs a singular contribution to modern Welsh debates about identity. This section will therefore explore this rich range of materials.

4: Transatlantic paradigms In this section, attention will be paid to models of comparison additional to those previously considered. These would include comparisons between Welsh and American industrial cultures, Welsh and American multilingualism, and Welsh writing in English and American regionalism – including Southern literature.

Dylan Thomas and the Idea of Welsh Writing in English

Locating Wales: Comparative Perspectives

Women Writing Modern Wales

‘American Wales’: Writing the Transatlantic

Welsh Identities: literature and nationhood

Click here to read the CREW Bibliography