David Jones on Politics, Religion and Culture ─ Uncollected Writings

David Jones – author of In Parenthesis, the great epic poem of World War I – is increasingly recognised as a major voice in the first generation of British Modernist writers. Acclaimed by the likes of T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and W.H. Auden, his writing was deeply informed by his Christian faith and Welsh blood.

This book makes available for the first time a number of previously unpublished writings by Jones that cast new light not only on Jones's own writing but on the political, religious and cultural engagements of British Modernism. Annotated throughout, with substantial commentaries exploring the historical and critical contexts of each text, the book includes Jones's controversial writings on Hitler and the rise of fascism in the 1930s, an unfinished essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the transcript of newly discovered interview with Jones himself. Taken together, these writings give students and scholars alike new insights into the influences and assumptions of early twentieth-century British literary culture.

David Jones (1895-1974) was a painter and poet, increasingly recognised as one of the most important and original voices in British Modernism. His epic poem In Parenthesis was described by T.S. Eliot as “a work of genius” and by Stephen Spender as “the most monumental work of poetic genius to come out of World War I” and his many admirers included W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden and Herbert Read.

Anne Price-Owen is Research and Postgraduate Tutor at the University of Wales, Trinity St. David, UK. She is head of the David Jones Society and Editor of the David Jones Journal.

Thomas Berenato is a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia, USA.

Kathleen Henderson Staudt is a teacher and Spiritual Director at the University of Maryland, Virginia Theological Seminary and Wesley Seminary, USA. She is author of At the Turn of a Civilization: David Jones and Modern Poetics (1994).