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Thesis (Ph.D.) in Individualized Ph.D. Program--University of Maine, 2004. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 321-329).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis examines representations of Welsh masculinity in six South Wales anglophone novels: Gwyn Jones’s ‘Times Like These’ (1936), Lewis Jones’s ‘Cwmardy’ (1937), Menna Gallie’s ‘Strike for a Kingdom’ (1959), Ron Berry’s ‘So Long, Hector Bebb’ (1970), Roger Granelli’s ‘Dark Edge’ (1997), and Kit Habianic’s ‘Until Our Blood is Dry’ (2014). Understanding masculinity as a cultural construct, the following chapters analyse the interconnection between the patriarchal, industrialised social context from which such masculinities emerge, as well as the generic forms through which they are fictionally inscribed in these novels. This thesis applies a broad range of literary and gender theories to close readings of Welsh industrial fiction. Specifically, it draws extensively on R. W. Connell’s formulation of hegemonic masculinity, supplemented by the prominent work of Judith Butler, Michael Kimmel and others. Pierre Macherey and Raymond Williams inform much of the understanding of the interrelationship of culture and society. And the work of Stephen Knight, Katie Gramich and Dai Smith, among many others, has been vital to this study’s understanding of the broad field of Welsh fiction in English. Chapter One adapts Raymond Williams’s tripartite schema of ‘dominant’, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ energies in social process to read masculinities in ‘Times Like These’ as studies inflected through a historicised perspective. Focusing on the construction of the individual rather the politicising of the community in ‘Cwmardy’, Chapter Two examines how the coercive paradigms of patriarchal masculinity in the novel fragment both the debilitatingly sensitive Len Roberts and his physically robust, though emotionally suppressed father, Jim. Chapter Three examines how Menna Gallie’s whodunnit ‘Strike for a Kingdom’ manipulates a traditionally patriarchal sub-genre to feminise and infantilise Welsh miners, thereby challenging both the gendering and genre of earlier male-authored industrial novels. Chapter Four diverges from considering masculinity as a cultural construct to argue that in Ron Berry’s paean to ‘authentic’ masculinity, ‘So Long, Hector Bebb’, Hector is an intertextualised amalgam of heroic, mythical characteristics whose lineage extends back to antiquity. The final chapter analyses how, in ‘Dark Edge’ and ‘Until Our Blood is Dry’, the 1984-85 miners’ strike subjects Welsh masculinities to fundamental challenges of self identity when confronted by a radical government and a politically engaged feminism. Although the critical field devoted to studying masculine representations in the Valleys is expanding, it remains relatively small. With the passing of the mining industry and its associated signifiers like boxing, a whole tranche of Welsh literary history is threatened with elision from public consciousness, or incorporation into a mythical retrospective of stabilised masculinity predicated on unassailable patriarchal hegemony. As becomes apparent in the following chapters, a gendered reading of the texts exposes ‘masculinity’ as an elusive concept, as capable of incarcerating men in a patriarchal code of practice as of liberating them.

This dissertation is the first intensive rhetorical analysis of the writings of St. Patrick. This analysis, informed by interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies, contributes to our understanding of the rhetorical nature of St. Patrick's writings, as well as the nature of rhetorical education in early medieval Britain and Ireland The literary significance of Patrick's extant writings, Epistola ad milites Corotici and Confessio, beyond their apparent historical value, has regularly been disputed by prominent scholars. Questions of the level of education Patrick received before being assigned to the bishopric in Ireland have informed debates over the quality and importance of his contribution to Hiberno-Latin literature. This study demonstrates the significance of Patrick's texts through discussion of Patrick's rhetorical astuteness and application of classical rhetorical techniques to a new and challenging context: that of a disseminating Christian world. The rhetorical strategies witnessed in Patrick's writings are decidedly Christian and therefore demonstrate the changing rhetorical culture of the early medieval period. The first chapters focus on ars dictaminis and Patrick's employment of the art of letter writing in Ireland in the 5th century CE. The rhetorical strategies detected in Patrick's Epistola ad milites Corotici are discussed relative to the socio-political and cultural context of early medieval Ireland. The later chapters study the Confessio in relationship to the Confession genre in the Late Roman and Early Medieval periods. Of particular significance here is the rhetorical practice of imitatio, which has deep reaching theological and ideological implications.

John Gwenogvryn Evans was an important figure in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Welsh Celtic Studies, because he published accurate diplomatic editions of medieval manuscripts that are still used today. He also compiled an important and detailed Report on Welsh Manuscripts for the Historic Manuscripts Commission that was of significant utility to scholars of his day, and still has uses for its detailed description of manuscripts. His extraordinary talent for accuracy in the reproduction of medieval script came to the attention of John Rhŷs, then Professor of Celtic at Jesus College, Oxford. Through Rhŷs he was exposed to the best scholarship of his day, and with the assistance of scholars such as Egerton Phillimore and John Morris Jones, he was enabled to produce work of enduring value. Due to his limited training in Welsh linguistics, and in research methodology, there were, from the start, serious flaws in his interpretation of early Welsh. Later, on losing contact with academic influences due to unwise actions, he fell into a pseudoscientific mentality more common earlier in the 19th century, seeking to find historical fact in poetry of legend and prophecy. Major errors arose from his later inclination to consider the date of a manuscript and the date of the content to be identical, and the ridicule that resulted from his 'amendments and translations' to early poetry so undermined his credibility that he never completed the full range of his intended series of texts. This study traces the origins, manifestations, and consequences of his dual nature through seven chapters. It considers the value of his solid earlier work, and balances it against the follies of his later translations, and seeks to give a fairer view of the value of his work to his own generation, and to those that followed on from him.