Academic literature on the topic 'Welsh litterature'

This essay looks at Arthur Machen's underexplored experimental masterpiece The Hill of Dreams (1897/1907), his personal novel rooted in the Decadent nineties. Its daringness does not just lie in the subject matter but also in the manner its stylistic techniques evoke. The present investigation is interested in Machen's multifarious use of the image of the maze/labyrinth – or Welsh caerdroia – an apt symbol for the presentation of London. Machen's labyrinth is a motif, a metaphor for the thought process, and a metafictional device. In the story of Lucian Taylor, the troubled self-destructive litterateur, the labyrinthine characterises not only setting, terrain, self-movement, mind, and textual tissue, but also the way these components, or modalities, come together. Aside from showcasing the various ways the labyrinth materialises in The Hill of Dreams, the essay argues that Machen's achievement consists of a discursive meta-labyrinth that cuts across, or combines, the different spheres of consciousness, terrain, and textuality. The concepts of pattern recognition, liminal thresholds, and ‘infolding’ are employed in support of the claims made.

Se présentant comme témoin oculaire de la guerre de Troie, Darès le Phrygien est l’historien de référence du Moyen Âge latin sur le conflit troyen. Au XIIIe siècle, son ouvrage, De Excidio Troiæ, est traduit dans plusieurs langues vernaculaires, parmi lesquelles le français, le gallois ou l’islandais (ou norrois). Mais le récit de Darès vient rarement seul : on le trouve associé au récit romain, ainsi qu’à l’histoire des Bretons (les actuels Gallois), qui pensent à l’époque être d’ascendance troyenne. Dans cette étude, j’analyse les stratégies textuelles à l’oeuvre pour légitimer le transfert du récit darétique vers les langues vernaculaires et s’approprier ce récit par une nouvelle communauté textuelle, non latinisée. Ce travail se présente comme une étude comparée de ces trois corpus. Après une présentation du contexte d’écriture, des manuscrits, vient une analyse des sources et des manières dont elles sont employées par les traducteurs. Après une analyse des compilations, vient celle des stratégies textuelles internes, c’est-à-dire le traitement du texte de Darès, les modifications, l’explicitation des références, la figure du narrateur et les conceptions de l’histoire exprimées dans ces oeuvres. Je tâche de montrer ici que l’appropriation de la matière troyenne, si elle n’est jamais expliquée, provenait d’un intérêt spécifique pour le récit de Darès et l’histoire de Troie de manière générale
Presenting himself as an eyewitness of the Trojan war, Dares Phrygius is the reference historian of the Latin Middle Ages when it comes to the war of Troy. In the 13th century, his work, De Excidio Troiæ, wastranslated in many vernacular languages, amongst them French, Welsh and Norse (i.e. Icelandic). But the story of Dares seldom comes alone: it is often associated with the story of Romans or even of Bretons (i.e. Welsh), as they thought themselves then to be of Trojan ascent. In this study, I analyze the textual strategies at work in order to legitimize the transfer of Dares’s story towards vernacular languages and to appropriate this story by a new, unlatinized, textual community. This work presents itself as a compared study of these three corpuses. After a presentation of the context in which they were written and their manuscripts comes an analysis of the sources and their uses by the translators. After analyzing the compilations, I turn towards internal textual strategies, that is the treatment of the story of Dares, the modifications, the explanation of references, the role of the narrator and how history was conceived therefore in these works. In this study, I endeavor to show that appropriating the Trojan matter, even if the process is never made explicit in the texts, came from a specific interest for the story of Dares and more generally for the history of Troy