Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature

Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies offers a revelatory rereading of the early twentieth century English poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917). Adapting Pascale Casanova’s vision of world literature as a system of competing national traditions, Andrew Webb analyzes Thomas’s appropriation of Anglocentric British literary culture during key moments of historical crisis in the twentieth century: after World War I, before and after World War II, and the resumption of war in Ireland in the 1970s. Webb shows how the dominant linguistic assumptions underpinning the discipline of English literature marginalize the Welshness of Thomas’s work. He then combines this revised world literature model with fresh archival research to reveal how Thomas’s reading of Welsh culture—its folk and literary traditions—is central to both his creation of an innovative body of poetry and to his extensive prose.