Abstract

This essay offers a discussion of Times Like These outside the parameters of the 'industrial novel', though the industrial narrative inevitably lurks in the background. It sees the date of the novel's publication in 1936 as a significant moment in the heated debate over whether Anglo-Welsh novels were, by their very linguistic medium, a hybridised branch of English literature and were therfore alien to true Cymraeg culture. Gwyn Jones's view was that, while Cymraeg writing speaks to Welsh speakers only, 'mongrelised' anglophone Welsh writing could speak to the world. This essay offers an outline of the debate and its protagonists before examining in greater detail how and why Jones, a self-confessed 'mongrel', sparingly but notably, hybridises his 'quiet and honest story' further to locate aspects of the striking miners' behaviour within a cultural tradition extending back to the foundational literatures of western Europe, most notably classical pastoral. In doing so, it contests the view that they are 'not convincingly appropriate'.

Keywords: Welsh Writing in English, pastoral, hybridity versus 'purity'.

How to Cite:

Jenkins, J. P., (2025) “'Mongrelising' the Novel: Gwyn Jones's 'Times Like These'”, International Journal of Welsh Writing in English 12(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16922/ijwwe.12.4