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.