Dahl's Chickens, Home to Roost at Last

[steepholm]

For anyone who wants to read it, my review of Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected is live at the Journal of Welsh Writing in English. (Full disclosure, the editor was my head of school at the time.) The book was published in 2016, and I submitted my review in July the following year: it's just gone live. This gives me hope that Literary Studies Deconstructed too may yet garner a second review one day...

Comments

[calimac]

I particularly liked "very like a Wales" not just for the pun in the literary reference, but for the point you make about the challenge of finding Welsh allusions or parallels in material not obviously Welsh. If I knew any Welsh industrial novels (or English ones for that matter) would I have seen them in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? I wonder.

[steepholm]

When the plan for this volume was first bruited (before I worked in Cardiff myself) I was invited to contribute a chapter, but had to decline as I just couldn't think of an angle that I could make work. I think it's fair to say that the contributors wrung every drop of Welshness possible from Dahl and his works - a not unworthy achievement, all told.