Sarah Prescott - Böcker

In a lecture entitled The First Forty Years: Some Notes on Anglo-Welsh Literature, published in 1957, the novelist and critic Gwyn Jones stated that Welsh writing in English 'began with Caradoc Evans in 1915'. His claim was widely accepted and proved influential in the development of Welsh writing in English as an academic subject. The primary aim of this volume is to refute that erroneous misconception, as its sub-title The First Four Hundred Years indicates. From 1536, the date of that Act which bound Wales to England, an abundance of Welsh authors chose to write in English. Some did so because their education had been entirely in English and they were not fully literate in Welsh. Others chose English with deliberate political intent, aiming to alert anglophone audiences to the social situation in Wales and persuade them of the value of the Welsh language and its literature. Their work constitutes a site of prolonged political tension, in which the pros and cons of the continuing existence of Wales are argued intensively. How far is it possible to reconfigure a self-consciousness forged under the dominion of a non-indigenous culture? This is an issue of central concern to large tracts of the worlds population today; in Wales it has for centuries featured large in English-language — as well as Welsh- language — writing. The First Four Hundred Years is also informed by social class and gender issues as it rescues from oblivion the work of many forgotten male and female writers.

Examines Welsh writing in English in the context of critical debates concerning the rise of cultural nationalism and the 'invention' of Great Britain as a nation in the eighteenth century. This study investigates the ways in which Anglophone literature from and about Wales imagines the nation and its culture in a range of genres

Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology reveals women's poetic activity and production across the three nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, overturning the long-standing and widespread bias in favour of English writers that has historically shaped both scholarly and popular understanding of this period's female poetic canon. Prioritising texts that have never before been published or translated, readers are introduced to an extraordinary array of women's voices. From countesses to servant maids, from erotic verse to religious poetry, women's immense poetic output across four centuries, multiple vernaculars, and national traditions is richly demonstrated. Featuring translations and glosses of texts in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, alongside informative headnotes on each poet, this collection makes the work of women poets available like never before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Anthologies play an essential role in shaping literary history. This anthology reveals women's poetic activity and production across the three nations of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales from 1400 to 1800, overturning the long-standing and widespread bias in favour of English writers that has historically shaped both scholarly and popular understanding of this period's female poetic canon. Prioritising texts that have never before been published or translated, readers are introduced to an extraordinary array of women's voices. From countesses to servant maids, from erotic verse to religious poetry, women's immense poetic output across four centuries, multiple vernaculars, and national traditions is richly demonstrated. Featuring translations and glosses of texts in Irish, Ulster Scots, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh, alongside informative headnotes on each poet, this collection makes the work of women poets available like never before. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Writing Wales explores representations of Wales in English and Welsh literatures written across a broad sweep of history, from the union of Wales with England in 1536 to the beginnings of its industrialization at the turn of the nineteenth century. The collection offers a timely contribution to the current devolutionary energies that are transforming the study of British literatures today, and it builds on recent work on Wales in Renaissance, eighteenth-century, and Romantic literary studies. What is unique about Writing Wales is that it cuts across these period divisions to enable readers for the first time to chart the development of literary treatments of Wales across three of the most tumultuous centuries in the history of British state-formation. Writing Wales explores how these period divisions have helped shape scholarly treatments of Wales, and it asks if we should continue to reinforce such period divisions, or else reconfigure our approach to Wales' literary past. The essays collected here reflect the full 300-year time span of the volume and explore writers canonical and non-canonical alike: George Peele, Michael Drayton, Henry Vaughan, Katherine Philips, and John Dyer here feature alongside other lesser-known authors. The collection showcases the wide variety of literary representations of Wales, and it explores relationships between the perception of Wales in literature and the realities of its role on the British political stage.