ABSTRACT
The engagement with hybridity functions on a number of levels in this chapter, and I will suggest that hybridity offers useful models both in terms of locating, or rather making a space for, Bertha Thomas within contemporary academic discourses and also, in a different way, in the interpretation of her fiction. With reference to the former intervention, we might conveniently understand the theoretical use of hybridity as a strategic model which resists narrow and exclusive categorizations. With reference to the second approach, an awareness of the discourses of hybridity allows us to focus on Thomas’s sustained interest in the outsider, the alien, the criss-crossing of boundaries of culture, nationality and language as well as those of class and gender. For the purposes of this chapter, I will concentrate on Thomas’s short stories, of which she published two volumes: Camera Lucida; or, Strange Passages in Common Life (1897) and Picture Tales from Welsh Hills (1912), and specifically on those stories set in Wales, although I also consider how the themes identified therein may be traced through her other writing, fiction and non-fiction.
