Resistance in the ‘Oppressor’s Tongue’

English-Language Welsh Writers and Spanish-Language Catalan Writers

Catriona Coutts

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781837723423
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781837723447
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume presents a comparison of Welsh writing in English and Catalan writing in Spanish, and analyses the work of selected authors from each literature: Harri Webb, R. S. Thomas and Rhys Davies from Wales; Albert Sánchez Piñol and Eduardo Mendoza from Catalonia. From a resistance literature perspective, the author asks whether it is possible for a literature of national resistance to exist in a language that is not the national language. Traditionally, Welsh literature and Catalan literature have been defined as literatures written in Welsh or Catalan – while positions are shifting, the idea that there could be national resistance literature written in other languages remains novel. Resistance literature is not an approach previously applied to study either Welsh writing in English or Catalan writing in Spanish, and this book argues that the writings under consideration have produced varying degrees of 'resistance literature'. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• 1 Harri Webb and ‘The Saga of Welsh Resistance’
• 2 ‘The darker our twilight hours, the more blessed will be the dawn of those who will come after us’: Catalonia – the Nation that was and the State that will be
• 3 ‘Armed but not in the old way’: The Seeds of Hope in R. S. Thomas
• 4 Recovering History, Recovering Writers – Eduardo Mendoza’s La ciudad de los prodigios and Rhys Davies’s Rhondda Trilogy
• Epilogue: A Growing Need for Resistance Literature?
• Bibliography
• Notes