Wales and the French Revolution: Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt - Essays on Wales and the French Revolution

ISBN: 9780708325902

Publication Date: 06 April 2013

Publisher: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru / University of Wales Press

Edited by Mary-Ann Constantine, Dafydd Johnston

Format: Paperback, 234x156 mm, 352 pages

Language: English

A collection of essays exploring the impact on Welsh culture of one of the most exciting periods in history, the decades surrounding the French Revolution of 1789.

The following has been provided by the Publisher:

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Writing the Revolution in Wales

Mary-Ann Constantine and Dafydd Johnston

2. Wales as Nowhere: the tabula rasa of the ‘Jacobin’ imagination

Caroline Franklin

3. Rousseau and Wales

Heather Williams

4. ‘Our first concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’: Richard Price’s response to the French Revolution

Paul Frame and Geoffrey W. Powell

5. The Welsh in Revolutionary Paris

Mary-Ann Constantine

6. The ‘Marseillaise’ in Wales

Marion Löffler

7. The ‘Rural Voltaire’ and the ‘French madcaps’

Geraint H. Jenkins

8. Networking the nation: the bardic and correspondence networks of Wales and London in the 1790s

Cathryn A. Charnell-White

9. Radical adaptation: translations of medieval Welsh poetry in the 1790s

Dafydd Johnston

10. ‘Brave Republicans’: representing the Revolution in a Welsh interlude

Ffion Mair Jones

11. ‘A good Cambrio-Briton’: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Helen Maria Williams, and the Welsh sublime in the 1790s

Jon Mee

12. What is a national Gothic?

Murray Pittock

13. Terror, treason and tourism: the French in Pembrokeshire 1797

Hywel M. Davies

14. The voices of war: poetry from Wales 1794–1804

Elizabeth Edwards

15. The Revd William Howels (1778–1832) of Cowbridge and London: the making of an anti-radical

Stephen K. Roberts

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.

Further Information:

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.