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This three-volume edition of the correspondence of Iolo Morganwg offers unique insights into the career and works of one of the most creative and influential figures in the history of modern Wales. A total of 1, 230 letters vividly reveal the extent of his multifarious interests and the diverse networks of friends, acquaintances, and enemies who brought both blessing and curses into his turbulent life. One of the finest exponents of the epistolary arts of his own day, Morganwg comes across in the letters as a garrulous, digressive figure, warm-blooded in his patriotism, devoted to his native tongue and its literature, and implacably opposed to injustice and cruelty. This fully annotated edition provides fascinating reading for anyone interested in Welsh society, the world happenings of Romanticism, and the literature of Britain and Wales.
A cunning and successful literary forger, Iolo Morganwg has been a controversial figure within Welsh literary tradition and history ever since his death in 1826. During his lifetime, however, he was largely a figure on the margins of Welsh literary society, who found the task of getting his work into the coveted sphere of print culture a gargantuan one. This book examines how he dealt with the frustrations of his marginality – writing sardonic remarks in the margins of books published by his contemporaries, and submerging himself in a mound of scrap paper on which he wrote numerous drafts of poems and conducted original work on the Welsh language.
Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution provides for the first time an edition, with parallel English translations, of Welsh-language ballads composed in reaction to the momentous events of the Revolution in France and the two decades of war which followed. Ballad writers were first spurred to respond in 1793, when the French monarchs were executed, France declared war upon Britain, and paranoia regarding the possible threat of internal revolt in Britain reached a crisis point. As the decade proceeded, ballads were sung in thanks for the victory of British forces and local people against an invasion of Pembrokeshire by French troops, and in reaction to key naval battles and to the extensive m...
This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.
This anthology of Welsh poetry and English translations presents some of Wales's radical and reactionary responses to the French Revolution and its cultural legacy, 1789-1805.
In recent years, the assumption that traditional songs originated from a primarily oral tradition has been challenged by research into ’street literature’ - that is, the cheap printed broadsides and chapbooks that poured from the presses of jobbing printers from the late sixteenth century until the beginning of the twentieth. Not only are some traditional singers known to have learned songs from printed sources, but most of the songs were composed by professional writers and reached the populace in printed form. Street Ballads in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and North America engages with the long-running debate over the origin of traditional songs by examining street literature’s interaction with, and influence on, oral traditions.
This is the first full-scale study of the political radicalism of Iolo Morganwg, the renowned Welsh romantic whose colourful life as a Glamorgan stonemason, poet, writer, political activist and humanitarian made him one of the founders of modern Wales. This path-breaking volume offers a vivid portrait of a natural contrarian who tilted against the forces of the establishment for the whole of his adult life. Known as the ‘Bard of Liberty’ or the ’little republican bard’, he moved in highly-politicized circles, embraced republicanism, founded the Gorsedd of the Bards of the Isle of Britain, threw in his lot with Unitarians, promoted a sense of cultural nationalism, and supported the anti-slave trade campaign and the anti-war movement during years of war, oppression and cruelty.
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.
In the period following the French revolution in 1789, Welsh poets continually reflected on the extraordinary new era in which they lived through their writing. Effortlessly ranging from Wales’s deep and distant history to accounts of the most topical and urgent current affairs, their poems on war, Welshness, druids, parted lovers and sublime landscapes encompass the beautiful, the brutal and the mysterious. Facing a future that often seemed agonisingly uncertain, poets in Wales used their verses to voice their thoughts and feelings about events that had rocked the whole of Europe, and whose effects continued to be felt long after 1789. This new selection of poetry from Wales sets recently-discovered manuscript texts alongside little-known early printed poems, offering a full and accessible introduction to Welsh poetry in English in the period 1780-1820.
Phyllis Kinney's Welsh Traditional Music covers the traditional music of Wales from its beginnings through to the present day, providing musical analysis and placing its material firmly into a social and historical context. Among the many different forms of Welsh traditional music discussed are seasonal music (including wassail songs, Christmas and May carols and Plygain carols), folk drama, ballad-singing, the relevance of the eisteddfod and the musical journals of the nineteenth century. Additionally, the book includes a history of song collecting from the eighteenth century to the establishment and ongoing activities of the Welsh Folk-Song Society in the twentieth; both the instrumental and the vocal traditions are examined, as well as the uniquely Welsh tradition of ‘cerdd dant’. This is a work of pioneering scholarship that accounts for Welsh traditional music within the context of a greater Welsh musical tradition.