Minority Language Writers in the Wake of World War One A Case Study of Four European Authors

This book presents a comparative literary study of the works of four writers working in European minority languages - Frisian, Welsh, Scots and Breton.  The author examines the different strategies employed by the four writers to create distinctive literary fields for their languages in the interwar era when self-determination had been promised to national minorities, finding that each had to make some degree of a step backwards into the past to enable them to make a leap forward. The book also discusses the problems resulting from this oscillation between traditionalism and modernism, drawing on concepts such as Pascale Casanova's 'littératures combatives' to make sense of these minority languages and communities within the wider European context. This study will be of interest to students and scholars of minority languages - particularly the four explored here - as well as twentieth-century and comparative literature, multilingualism, and language policy. 

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Frisia and the World: Douwe Kalma During and Shortly After the First World War.- Chapter 3: Reconnecting Wales to Europe: Saunders Lewis in the Interwar Years.- Chapter 4: Where Extremes Meet: Hugh MacDiarmid in the Period After World War One.- Chapter 5: Roparz Hemon: Combative Linguistic and Literary Nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s.- Chapter 6: Conclusions.

Jelle Krol is a Subject Librarian and Specialist at Tresoar, the Frisian Literary and Historical Centre in Leeuwarden, The Netherlands. He received his PhD in 2018 from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.