An aerial view of Singleton Campus and the bay opposite

Mr Geraint Evans

Senior Lecturer, English Literature

geraint.evans@swansea.ac.uk

Fluent Welsh Speaker

Available For Postgraduate Supervision

Research Links

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8548-9292

About

GERAINT EVANS teaches modern literature in the Department of English at Swansea University and is a member of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW).

His research interests include literary modernism, Welsh writing in English and the history of the book in Britain, often with a focus on the languages and cultures of Wales and their interaction with England and international English culture.

Geraint trained in theatre and performance at the Rose Bruford College, London before studying at Birkbeck College, London, University of Wales Swansea, and Clare College, Cambridge. Before moving to Swansea he taught modern British and Irish literature at the University of Sydney.

Geraint has published widely on the literatures of England and Wales in the twentieth century and also on the history of the book in Britain, particularly in the early modern period. He is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, which was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.

Areas Of Expertise

English literature since 1890
Welsh writing in English
The literature of Wales
Crime fiction since 1920
The history of the book in Britain
Publishing history

Career Highlights

Teaching Interests

Twentieth century literature in English
Welsh writing in English
Literary Modernism
Poetry since 1890
Crime fiction since 1920

Research

Publications

Research Highlights

Evans, G. (Ed.). (2019). The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316227206, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36029
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316227206
Evans, G. (2014). Meeting King Lud at the Fleet Gate: David Jones and the Welshness of London. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, n.s. 20 (2014), 60-68.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa22248
Evans, G. (2017). Antiquarianism and proto-nationalism in Elizabeth Hardy’s Owen Glendower (1849). (pp. 87-102).
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36028
Evans, G. (2017). ‘The Ship of Fools’ in Sian Echard and Robert Rouse, eds., The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Wiley Blackwell
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36318
Evans, G. (2017). ‘The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales’ in Sian Echard and Robert Rouse, eds., The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, eds. Sian Echard and Robert RouseWiley Blackwell
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36319

All Research

Journal Articles

Evans, G. (2014). Meeting King Lud at the Fleet Gate: David Jones and the Welshness of London. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, n.s. 20 (2014), 60-68.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa22248
Evans, G. (2013). ‘Edward Thomas and the canon of Welsh writing in English’. International Journal of Welsh Writing in English, 1, 81-93.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa318
Evans, G. (2013). ‘Modernism and magic in the adaptation of Caradog Prichard's Un Nos Ola Leuad/One Full Moon’. Studies in European Cinema, 9(2/3), 123-130.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa315
Evans, G. (2011). 'The Authorship of Drych Cydwybod [?1616]'. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, XVII, 1-13.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa312
Evans, G. (2010). 'Heb Ddieu Heb Ddim: the Welsh printer’s device on Shakespeare quarto title-pages'. Studia Celtica, 44(1), 155-164.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa11423
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/uwp/stce/2010/00000044/00000001/art00008
Evans, G. (2009). 'A lost seventeenth-century Welsh book rediscovered in Paris'. Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, XV, 28-40.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa11425
Evans, G. (2008). 'Wales and the Welsh language in Andrew Borde’s Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge'. Studia Celtica, 42(1), 87-104.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa301
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/uwp/stce/2008/00000042/00000001/art00005

Authored Books

Evans, G. (2011). Morgan Bach in Australia: Reproductions of Two Welsh Migration Ballads from the 1850s, with Translations and Introduction by Geraint Evans The Ancora Press.
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa310

Book Chapters

Evans, G. (2017). Antiquarianism and proto-nationalism in Elizabeth Hardy’s Owen Glendower (1849). (pp. 87-102).
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36028
Evans, G. (2017). ‘The Ship of Fools’ in Sian Echard and Robert Rouse, eds., The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. Wiley Blackwell
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36318
Evans, G. (2017). ‘The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales’ in Sian Echard and Robert Rouse, eds., The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, eds. Sian Echard and Robert RouseWiley Blackwell
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36319
Evans, G. (2013). 'Modernity and the technology of communication in Ford Madox Ford's A Call and Henry James's In The Cage'. International Ford Madox Ford Studies XII: The Edwardian Ford (pp. 159-170). Rodopi
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa15083
Evans, G. (2009). ‘Modernist Arthur: the Welsh revival’. A Companion to Arthurian Literature (pp. 434-448). Wiley-Blackwell
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa305
http://eu.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405157895.html
Evans, G. (2008). ‘William Salesbury and Welsh printing in London before 1557’. Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales (pp. 251-266). Palgrave Macmillan
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa307
Evans, G. (2008). ‘Elizabeth Eisenstein and the idea of media history’. Recharting Media Studies (pp. 173-194). Peter Lang
SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa309

Edited Books

Evans, G. (Ed.). (2019). The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316227206, SU Repository: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa36029
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316227206

Supervision

Merlinland: David Jones and the Modernist Writing of Wales (current)

PhD

Other supervisor: Prof Kirsti Bohata
Madness, Comedy and Characterisation (current)

PhD

Other supervisor: Dr Alan Bilton

Taught Modules

EN-120 English Essentials

This is a skills-based module which will equip students with the technical and critical expertise that is necessary for their academic journey in English Literature and Creative Writing. It is designed to support the transition from post-16 study to undergraduate study and to show students *how* to become successful scholars of English. How should we read texts? How do we write essays? Focusing on an exciting anthology of texts selected by the English academics at Swansea, this team-taught module uncovers the power of written language. We will explore how writers inspire and challenge their readers, how to think critically, how to close-read, how to construct powerful arguments and how to produce written work that is rigorous, academic and convincing. This module empowers students to think, write, and persuade.
EN-207 Revolution of the Word: Modernism

An introduction to Modernist literature, focussing upon its origins in response to the crisis of modernity, its engagement with colonialism and the First World War, its formal experimentation, its depiction of city-life and its engagement with new ideas of gender and the unconscious.
EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

The Dissertation is an optional, two-semester, 40-credit module designed to develop high-level academic skills and intellectual independence in the students. A first-semester skills-building programme will include: research skills, summary skills, bibliographic skills, ability to synthesise succinctly, planning and organisational skills, correct presentation of a thesis and bibliography, presentational skills and public speaking. Students conduct research on a subject of their choice, devised in consultation with a member of the English literature staff. The topic will be devised to fall within staff research and teaching specialisms, broadly defined. Students attend group sessions on research skills in Semesters 1 and 2, and have individual meetings with supervisors in Semester 2.
EN-3043 Poetry in the Twentieth Century

`Poetry in the Twentieth Century¿ is a survey of English-language poetry from Modernism to the new millennium. The module begins with American poetry and the imagists who worked in Paris and London many of whom, like Ezra Pound, H.D. and e.e. cummings, were American. The module examines the relationship between the development of imagism and the work of other American modernist poets such as Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams. The module then turns to the English poets of the mid twentieth century and the work of Phillip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill, before considering some of the recent English-language poets of Ireland and Wales, including Seamus Heaney and Gwyneth Lewis.
EN-3045 Crime Fiction since 1920

The two decades between the two World Wars have been called the Golden Age of crime fiction. This was the period when the modern detective story emerged as a major element in literary and popular culture. Energised by the challenge of modernity detective stories commented on the world while combining the thrill of the new with a conservative nostalgia for tradition. This Semester 2 module will look at the development of crime fiction since the 1920s, concentrating on British writers, while also looking at some key examples of European crime writing. The module concludes by looking at some examples of crime fiction from the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, encouraging students to look for patterns of continuity and change across a century of British and European crime fiction.
EN-M42 Welsh Identities: literature and nationhood

What does it mean when we speak of Wales and 'Welshness'? How does the study of literary texts help us to answer such questions? What is the relationship between literature and nationhood? Drawing on a wide range of texts this course begins by exploring the ways in which Welsh national identity has been described and represented by Welsh writers in the twentieth century. We then proceed to explore other kinds of communal identities that have been equally prominent in the ways in which the Welsh have thought of themselves and envisaged their place in the world. We explore how class, gender, religious and ethnic identities have reinforced and challenged an often precarious sense of ' Welshness', and trace the tensions as they take aesthetic form in the writings of Emyr Humphreys, Christopher Meredith, Raymond Williams, Trezza Azzopardi and others.
EN-M45 Dylan Thomas and the Rise of Welsh Writing in English

Was Dylan Thomas the beginning (and end?) of Welsh writing in English? If not, then when did it begin? And does it make any difference as to when we suppose it does? What, in any case, is meant by speaking of a Welsh Literature in English? What definition of it can one offer, and what model of such a body of work can one construct? These are the kinds of issues to be considered in this course. It is accordingly subdivided into two sections. The first is concerned with the range of responses to Thomas's writings in Wales itself, and the ways in which he was made to represent the Anglophone literature of Wales in England and the United States. The second considers other possible "beginnings" for Welsh writing in English ( ranging from the Middle Ages to the First World War and to the thirties generation of genius). We conclude by discussing some of the theoretical and cultural isses involved in constructing literary tradition.
EN-M75 Modernist writing in London, Paris and New York

Much of the vibrant experimentation of English modernist writing can be located in the two great cities of London and Paris on either side of the First World War. Modernist culture is strongly located in the idea of the metropolis and one way of approaching English literature of this period is to look at the writers who were grouped around Ford and Conrad¿s English Review, before the war in London and then Ford¿s Transatlantic Review, after the war in Paris. Pound, Hemingway, H.D., Joyce, Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Wyndham Lewis all find an audience through these little magazines, as do many other writers, including Ford and Conrad themselves. Writers also cluster around Bloomsbury in London and, after the war, around the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris and the associated publishing ventures of Sylvia Beach and Bill Bird. Like many of the writers who worked in Paris in the twenties, Beach and Bird were American and in the work of writers such as Henry James and Edith Wharton New York is constructed as the metropolis of the new world, the third great centre of literary modernism. ¿Paris is a big city,¿ wrote Edmund White, ¿in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages and Zürich a backwater.¿ This module will look at a range of modernist writers who were active in London or Paris in the first four decades of the twentieth century. We will look at novels, short stories, memoirs, travel writing and poetry and will use the idea of the metropolis to look for patterns of continuity and difference in English literary modernism before 1939.
EN-M89 Publishing: Cultures and Contexts

This team-taught module introduces students to different cultures and contexts of the publishing industry and its history. Students will gain both practical and intellectual skills across a range of topics taught by staff from English Literature and Creative Writing. The module begins with focused seminars on book history and print culture, and then moves on to workshops in which students will gain a familiarity with industry terminology and the mechanisms of the book trade. Students will be able to choose from different methods of assessment that develop academic or industry-focused skills.

Other Roles

Staff member of CREW, Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of

2017 - 2020

Mr Geraint Evans

Email address

Welsh language proficiency

Research Links

About

Areas Of Expertise

Career Highlights

Research Highlights

All Research

Merlinland: David Jones and the Modernist Writing of Wales (current)

Madness, Comedy and Characterisation (current)

EN-120 English Essentials

EN-207 Revolution of the Word: Modernism

EN-3031 Dissertation - English Literature

EN-3043 Poetry in the Twentieth Century

EN-3045 Crime Fiction since 1920

EN-M42 Welsh Identities: literature and nationhood

EN-M45 Dylan Thomas and the Rise of Welsh Writing in English

EN-M75 Modernist writing in London, Paris and New York

EN-M89 Publishing: Cultures and Contexts

Staff member of CREW, Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of