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Palgrave Macmillan

Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One

A Case Study of Four European Authors

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Jelle Krol

    1. Tresoar, Frysk Histoarysk en Letterkundich Sintrum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands

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  • Examines interwar minority language writing by authors from four northwest European emergent nations
  • Analyses seminal texts by Frisian author Douwe Kalma, Welsh playwright Saunders Lewis, Scots poet Hugh MacDiarmid and Breton writer Roparz Hemon
  • Compares the authors' strategies for depicting nationhood between traditionalism and modernism

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiii
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  2. Introduction

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 1-18

  3. Frisia and the World: Douwe Kalma During and Shortly After the First World War

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 19-74

  4. Reconnecting Wales to Europe: Saunders Lewis in the Interwar Years

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 75-144

  5. Where Extremes Meet: Hugh MacDiarmid in the Period After World War One

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 145-213

  6. Roparz Hemon: Combative Linguistic and Literary Nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 215-285

  7. Conclusions

    • Jelle Krol
    Pages 287-326

  8. Back Matter

    Pages 327-346
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Keywords

About this book

This book presents a comparative literary study of the works of four writers working in European minority languages - Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton.  The author examines the different strategies employed by the four writers to create distinctive literary fields for their languages in the interwar era when self-determination had been promised to national minorities, finding that each had to make some degree of a step backwards into the past to enable them to make a leap forward. The book also discusses the problems resulting from this oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, drawing on concepts such as Pascale Casanova's 'littératures combatives' to make sense of these minority languages and communities within the wider European context. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages - particularly the four explored here - as well as twentieth-century and comparative literature, multilingualism, and language policy. 

Reviews

“This is a revelatory work exploring cultural relativities through four major authors, poets, playwrights, and novelists. Each in their national context supersedes any sense of the ‘peripheral’ and is centred in a shared historical moment, between the First and Second World Wars. Four very different figures are the focus of close literary study, contextually illuminating and explicating their individual characters and techniques. Jelle Krol is sensitive to the differences between the writers and their cultures, but equally able to build a larger argument in the context of international power relations and the values of literature. The book is a wide-ranging literary investigation with a firmly grounded sense of humanity, endorsing diversity as the one thing that unites cultural appreciation and a human sense of value. In this understanding, it is the worlds of literature and culture that generate a truly viable international diplomacy.” (Alan Riach, University of Glasgow, UK)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Tresoar, Frysk Histoarysk en Letterkundich Sintrum, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands

    Jelle Krol

About the author

Jelle Krol is a Subject Librarian and Specialist at Tresoar, the Frisian Literary and Historical Centre in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

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