French Revolution
“Footsteps of Liberty & Revolt”
Essays on Wales and the French Revolution
by Mary Ann Constantine (Author), Dafydd Johnston (Author),
Description
The late eighteenth century was one of the most exciting and unsettling periods in European history, with the shock-waves of the French Revolution rippling around the world. As this collection of essays by leading scholars shows, Wales was no exception. From political pamphlets to a Denbighshire folk-play, from bardic poetry to the remodelling of the Welsh landscape itself, responses to the revolutionary ferment of ideas took many forms. We see how Welsh poets and preachers negotiated complex London–Wales networks of patronage and even more complex issues of national and cultural loyalty; and how the landscape itself is reimagined in fiction, remodelled à la Rousseau, while it rapidly emptied as impoverished farming families emigrated to the New World. Drawing on a wealth of vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished, this collection marks another important contribution to ‘four nations’ criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and flashpoints of Romantic-period Wales.
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- Essays exploring a wide range of sources from the period 1790-1820 in both Welsh and English
- Much of the material unpublished, or little known
- Important contribution to current ‘four nations’ criticism, which is finally paying attention to voices from around the British Isles.
- Interdisciplinary: of value to historians and literary critics.
Endorsements
A fillip to (so-called) “four nations” engagements with the period, “Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt” reveals Wales to have been a dynamic player in the great ideological debate occasioned by the French Revolution. Offering culturally and linguistically plural views – a nuanced cartography – the essays in this collection show how invention, customisation and translation gave the master themes of the age a specifically Welsh modality. Profiled here are the broad range of forms and positions taken by Welsh responses (indigenous and expatriate) to revolution, from “piping hot” radicals to horrified reactionaries, from sermons to songs, poems to pamphlets. Also conjured are the human stories that remind us that the revolution’s “big ideas” were not merely theoretical, but had profound consequences on the ground. Above all, Wales emerges here as vitally connected – a vigorous agent in a European and Atlantic controversy whose inheritors we are.
Professor Damian Walford Davies Aberystwyth University
Author Biography
Mary-Ann Constantine is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, and Dafydd Johnston is Director of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies.
University of Wales Press
University of Wales Press believes in supporting and disseminating scholarship from and about Wales to a worldwide audience. They mainly publish books in the humanities, arts and sciences.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher University of Wales Press
- Publication Date April 2013
- Orginal LanguageEnglish
- ISBN/Identifier 9780708325902
- Publication Country or regionUnited Kingdom
- FormatPaperback
- Primary Price 24.99 GBP
- Pages352
- Publish StatusPublished
- SeriesWales and the French Revolution
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