Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country's internal diversity. To that end, the author's examined range - from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as 'Margiad Evans', to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a 'micro-cosmopolitan country', and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English and Emyr Humphreys Professor of English at Swansea University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Learned Society of Wales, and the author of twenty books on the two literatures of Wales and on American poetry.

Introduction
1 The Scarlet Woman: Lynette Roberts
2 Margiad Evans and Eudora Welty: a confluence of imaginations
3 'A Grand Harlequinade': the border writing of Nigel Heseltine
4 'There's words': Dylan Thomas, Swansea and Language
5 'A vast assemblage of unease': Emyr Humphreys's A Man's Estate
6 Outside the House of Baal: the evolution of a major novel
7 'Yr Hen Fam': R. S. Thomas and the Church in Wales
8 R. S. Thomas, 'Retired Christian'
9 Vernon Watkins, Taliesin in Gower
10 'Dubious Affinities': Leslie Norris's Welsh-English translations
11 Staying to mind things; Gillian Clarke's early poetry