Anglocentrism within British literary studies: the reception of Edward Thomas

Abstract

A decade after some measure of political devolution was achieved in Scotland and Wales, this article considers the late twentieth and early twenty-first century reception and critical positioning of the Anglophone Welsh writer, Edward Thomas, in order to expose a recalcitrant Anglocentrism which operates within a notionally devolved British literary establishment. It does so by way of Pascale Casanova's theory of world literature – in particular, her concept of ‘literary autonomy’ – the potential usefulness, and indeed the shortcomings, of which are here addressed within a British context for the first time. From the 1970s, Thomas becomes a contested figure among critics from an emergent Anglophone Welsh literature. At the same time, as the war in Ireland resumes, Thomas becomes a key writer for critics with associations to the unionist side of the Northern Irish divide. For them, Thomas becomes a means of re-telling the foundation myth of British Ulster identity: the Protestants’ ‘blood sacrifice’ for the union in the World War I. Finally, Thomas is appropriated as the key figure in a Philip Larkin and Andrew Motion-led attempt to re-centre twentieth-century poetry around an unbroken ‘English’ line of traditional poetic forms, created in opposition to the supposedly ‘foreign aberration’ of modernism.