Overview

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 DL as well as Welsh- language DL 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.

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9780199562831

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Both authors are particularly associated with feminist criticism and the recovery of female literary voices, and their volume is distinguished by the considerable attention given to Welsh women writers. * Helen Wilcox, Seventeenth-Century News *

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Emeritus Professor at the University of South Wales and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, Jane Aaron's publications include A Double Singleness: Gender and the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (Clarendon Press, 1991), Pur fel y Dur: Y Gymraes yn Llên Menywod y Bedwaredd Ganrif ar Bymtheg (UWP, 1998) which won the Ellis Griffith prize in 1999, and Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales (UWP, 2007), winner of the 2009 Roland Mathias Award. Her most recent volume is Welsh Gothic (UWP, 2013). She co-edited the essay collections Our Sisters' Land: The Changing Identities of Women in Wales (UWP, 1994), Postcolonial Wales (UWP, 2005) and Gendering Border Studies (UWP, 2010), and is also editor of Welsh Women's Classics, published by Honno Press, for which she has edited five volumes. Sarah Prescott is Principal and Dean of the College of Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin and Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. She specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and Irish women's writing and pre-1800 Welsh writing in English and has published many articles and chapters in her subject field. She is the author of Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690-1740 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Women and Poetry, 1660-1750 (with S. Prescott and D. Shuttleton, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (UWP, 2008) and Writing Wales from the Renaissance to Romanticism (with S. Mottram and S. Prescott, Ashgate, 2012). Professor Prescott is the Principal Investigator for the Leverhulme-funded project 'Women's Poetry from Ireland, Scotland, and Wales: 1400-1800'.

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