Roald Dahl , livre ebook

ROALD DAHL
ROALD DAHL
Wales of the Unexpected
edited by
Damian Walford Davies
© The contributors, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.
www.uwp.co.uk
British Library CIP Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-940-5
eISBN: 978-1-78316-942-9
The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Cover image: Quentin Blake, drawing of the young and old Roald Dahl inLlandaff Fields (by permission of A P Watt at United Agents, on behalf of the artist).
Contents
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
1 Introduction: Defamiliarising Dahl
Damian Walford Davies
2 Inscription and Erasure: Mining for Welsh Dahl in the Archive
Carrie Smith
3 How Sweet Was My Valley: Willy Wonka and the Welsh Industrial Novel
Tomos Owen
4 Wales of the Unexpected: Kiss, Kiss
Kevin Mills
5 Homes, Horizons and Orbits: Welsh Dahl and the Aerial View
Richard Marggraf Turley
6 Dahl and Dylan: Matilda , ‘In Country Sleep’ and Twentieth-century Topographies of Fear
Damian Walford Davies
7 ‘There is Something Very Fishy about Wales’: Dahl, Identity, Language
Ann Alston and Heather Worthington
8 Dahl-in-Welsh, Welsh Dahl: Translation, Resemblance, Difference
Siwan M. Rosser
9 Dahl’s Cardiff Spaces
Peter Finch
Acknowledgements
Excerpts from the published work and manuscripts of Roald Dahl are quoted by kind permission of the following: the Estate of Roald Dahl – © Roald Dahl Nominee Ltd; The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Great Missenden; the David Higham agency; Rily Publications ( www.rily.co.uk ); and as noted below in the case of individual titles:
Excerpts from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, text copyright © 1964, renewed 1992 by Roald Dahl Nominee Limited. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl, text copyright © 1972, renewed 2000 by Roald Dahl Nominee Limited. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl, text copyright © 1961, renewed 1989 by Roald Dahl. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Matilda , copyright © 1988 by Roald Dahl. Used by permission of Viking Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpts from The Minpins , copyright © 1991 by Felicity Dahl and the other Executors of the Estate of Roald Dahl. Used by permission of Viking Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpts from Boy: Tales of Childhood © 1984 by Roald Dahl. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpts from Going Solo © 1986 by Roald Dahl. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpts from The BFG © 1982 by Roald Dahl. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
I am most grateful to the following for their advice, assistance and generosity: Sir Quentin Blake for the cover image; Catherine Butler; Georgia Glover at David Higham; Luke Kelly; Emma Schofield; Tom Solomon; Donald Sturrock; and Rachel White (collections manager and archivist at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre, Great Missenden). I also thank those Dahl aficionados, Brychan Rhydderch Davies and Cristyn Rhydderch Davies.
List of Contributors
Ann Alston is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of the West of England, Bristol, where she specialises in children’s literature. She is the author of The History of the Family in English Children’s Literature (2008) and was co-editor of and contributor to the first collection of critical essays on Roald Dahl’s children’s books, Roald Dahl (New Casebooks; 2012).
Peter Finch is a poet, performer and psychogeographer. He was born in Cardiff, where he still lives. In his time he has been a sound-text manipulator, a literary entrepreneur, a magazine editor, publisher, bookseller and, more recently, CEO of Academi and its more recent incarnation, Literature Wales. His books include the Real Cardiff series, Selected Later Poems (2007), Zen Cymru (2010) and Edging The Estuary (2013). His most recent publication is The Roots Of Rock: From Cardiff To Mississippi And Back (2015). His web site is www.peterfinch.co.uk .
Kevin Mills is Professor of English Literature at the University of South Wales, where he teaches courses in Intertextuality, English Renaissance Literature, Nineteenth-century Literature, and Myth. Widely published on literary theory and Victorian literature, he is the author of Justifying Language: Paul and Contemporary Theory (1995); Approaching Apocalypse: Unveiling Revelation in Victorian Writing (2007); and The Prodigal Sign: A Parable of Criticism (2009). Three volumes of his poetry have been published by Cinnamon Press: Fool (2009), Libra (2012) and Stations of the Boar (2016).
Tomos Owen lectures in the School of English Literature at Bangor University, where he is Co-director of the MA in the Literatures of Wales/Llenyddiaethau Cymru. His research focuses principally on modern and contemporary Welsh writing in English, and he is currently completing a monograph on Welsh writing in London at the turn of the twentieth century, to be published by University of Wales Press.
Richard Marggraf Turley is Professor of English Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University. In 2012, he was also appointed Professor of Engagement with the Public Imagination. He is author of several books on the Romantic poets, including Keats’s Boyish Imagination (2004) and Bright Stars: John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Romantic Literary Culture (2009). He is the author of three poetry volumes, including Wan-Hu’s Flying Chair (2009) and most recently a crime novel set in the Regency period, The Cunning House (2015).
Carrie Smith is Lecturer in English Literature in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. She is co-editor of The Boundaries of the Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation (2013) and her published work on Ted Hughes focuses on questions of authenticity and voice in his poetry readings and recordings using original interviews and research undertaken in the BBC Written Archives. She has also published on Hughes’s creative partnership with American artist Leonard Baskin. She is currently preparing a monograph on Hughes and the art of writing.
Siwan M. Rosser lectures in the School of Welsh at Cardiff University. She has published on subjects including childhood deaths in Welsh literature, children’s fiction in translation, the construction of national identity in Edwardian children’s literature and linguistic code-switching in contemporary young adult poetry. Her forthcoming monograph explores the evolving concept of childhood in nineteenth-century texts aimed at young readers. She is also co-founder of the annual Cardiff Children’s Literature Festival and leads a European network on children’s literature in minority languages.
Damian Walford Davies is Professor of English and Head of the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. His recent publications include Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (2012), the poetry collections Judas (2015) and Witch (2012), and articles on the Romantic poets and cultures of trauma and illness. He is editor of Counterfactual Romanticism (forthcoming, 2017), Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy (2009), and, with Lynda Pratt, Wales and the Romantic Imagination (2007). He is currently editing The Misfortunes of Elphin for the Cambridge Edition of the novels of Thomas Love Peacock and is General Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Literary History of Wales .
Heather Worthington was Reader in English Literature at Cardiff University. Her research interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century crime narrative, sensation fiction and children’s literature. Her publications include The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-century Popular Fiction (2005), Key Concepts in Crime Fiction (2011) and contributions to A Companion to Crime Fiction (2010), The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Vol  II: The Nineteenth-Century Novel (2012), and Roald Dahl (New Casebooks; 2012). She is on the Editorial Board of Clues: A Journal of Detection .
1
Introduction: Defamiliarising Dahl
Damian Walford Davies
1. Plural Dahl
Quentin Blake’s cover illustration, drawn specially for this collection of essays, envisions an uncanny meeting. The young Roald Dahl – seven years old, perhaps, a new boy at the Cathedral School in well-heeled Llandaff, north-west of Cardiff – looks up with open-faced receptivity and inquisitiveness at his older self. The adult Dahl, not locked in garrulous conversation, it seems, but gazing intently down at himself, has a discernible stoop, the result of spinal trauma sustained when his Gloster Gladiator crashed in the Western Desert of