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Distributed for University of Wales Press

Roald Dahl

Wales of the Unexpected

Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected explores the complex ways in which Roald Dahl engages with Wales—the country of his birth and early life—throughout his work. The contributors reveal how both Dahl’s books for children and his fiction for adults can illuminatingly be read in terms of their author’s Anglo-Welsh identity. As a result, a new picture of Dahl emerges. Relocated through a Welsh lens, ‘the world’s number one storyteller’ appears in a convincing new light.
 

224 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2016

Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory


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Reviews

“Through the powerfully formative lens of Wales, the essays in this highly original and imaginative collection demonstrate the extent to which Dahl’s later development, as both writer and person, was shaped by his Welsh upbringing.”
 

David Rudd, University of Roehampton

“An intriguing and readable collection of essays that shines remarkable light into Roald Dahl’s complex and unexpected Welsh hinterland.”

Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl

Table of 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
 
Index
 

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