Output details

British Story plus A Modern Adventure and Kennedy Enquires

This output consists of THREE shorter creative writing pieces: “British Story”, New Welsh Review 97 (2012): 46-52 ISBN: 9780954030018; “A Modern Adventure”, Route Book at Bedtime, Route Publishing, 2010: 109-126. ISBN: 978-1901927429; “Kennedy Inquires”, Stand 10.3 (2011): 52-57 ISSN: 0038-9366. The two short stories, ‘A Modern Adventure’ and ‘Kennedy Inquires’, were both written as preparation for a forthcoming novel (British Story, Route Publishing, 2014). Both present a character, ‘Kennedy’, an academic who is the novel’s protagonist. The first story is an exercise in realism, and entailed detailed research into the image of the Second World War in our own time, along with consideration of the relationship between academic life and Britain’s industrial past. The second story is an exercise in surrealism, and was obliquely inspired by the seventh chapter of Kafka’s The Trial (a novel used by Nath as a model in his creative writing teaching to demonstrate an effect of the ‘grey fantastic’, and which has been an important reference point within his own research in modernism studies). The modes of writing presented in these stories are combined into a new form in British Story, which is, among other things, a critique of academic understanding, rationalism and the media; a study of the concept ‘character’; and an attempt to present Shakespeare criticism in novelistic fiction. The extract from British Story submitted as part of this output describes the ‘Plebs’ League’, a working-class educational institution that flourished in South Wales in the early twentieth century, and draws upon preliminary research conducted in the work of the historian Gwyn A. Williams, among other sources. Marked up hard copies of the two journal issues and the Route book in which these pieces appear have been submitted to the REF as a three-part ‘bundle’ within a single folder.