Welsh Responses To The French Revolution

The serial literature current in Wales between 1789 and 1802 is the most important public repository of radical, loyalist and patriotic Welsh responses to the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. This anthology presents a selection of poetry and prose published in the annual Welsh almanacs, the English provincial newspapers published close to Wales’s border and the three radical Welsh periodicals of the mid-1790s, together with translations of the Welsh texts. An extended introduction sketches out the printing culture of Wales, analyses its public discourse and interprets the Welsh voices in their British political context.

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.

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 Drawing on a wealth of vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished, this collection marks another important contribution to ‘four nations’ criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and flashpoints of Romantic-period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.

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 mobilization of militia and volunteer forces. Scholars working on the British response to the Revolution have showed increasing interest in exploring the contents of ballads and songs. The ballad in particular is seen as a vital source of information, since it represents ordinary people's awareness of the developments of the period. Balladry is also subject to continued research within Welsh scholarship, and this volume, with its focus on a clearly defined historical period and its revelation of new voices within the canon of Welsh ballad writers, will drive this field of study forwards. Regional reactions to the Revolution within the British Isles are also now seen as crucially important, but Wales, partly because of the inaccessibility of material composed in the Welsh language, has repeatedly been omitted from the general picture. This volume aids in rectifying this situation, ensuring (by use of translation, copious contextualizing notes, and a lengthy introduction) that both the ballad genre and Welsh reactions receive the attention they deserve from the wider scholarly community.

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.

This is essential reading for anybody who wishes to be fully informed of the British Revolution debate and/or teach the history of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment in Great Britain. All Welsh texts are translated, which makes them accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Four illustrations, among them the first political cartoon in the Welsh language, add valuable visual material and information.

This new selection of Anglophone Welsh poetry presents a range of literary responses to the French Revolution and the ensuing wars with France, a period in which Wales and its history became prime imaginative territory for poets of all political sympathies.

This collection of essays addresses the role of literature in radical politics. Topics covered include the legacy of Robert Burns, broadside literature in Munster and radical literature in Wales.