Wales and the French Revolution

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The French Revolution of 1789 was the defining event of the Romantic period in Europe. It unsettled not only the ordering of society but language and thought itself: its effects were profound and long-lasting. Over the last twenty years, scholarship in this area has radically changed our understanding of the impact of the Revolution and its aftermath on British and European culture. In literature, as critical attention has shifted from a handful of major poets to the non-canonical 'edges', we can now see how the works of women writers, self-educated writers, radical pamphleteers, religious enthusiasts and loyalist propagandists both shaped and were shaped by the language and ideas of the period. Yet surprising gaps remain. Even recent studies of the 'British' reaction to the Revolution are under-informed about responses from the regions, and Wales is particularly poorly served. The reasons for this are complex, but it is clear that many researchers working in this period are simply unaware of the kinds of sources available for comparative study. At the time of the 1801 census the vast majority of people living in Wales spoke no English: eighteenth-century Wales, in other words, retained a markedly distinct cultural and linguistic identity. How, then, did the events in Europe and the British reaction to them come to be known and felt throughout the different levels of Welsh society? In what ways did Welsh responses differ from those in Scotland, Ireland or London? This project will explore these questions through a wide-ranging series of edited texts, chosen to reflect the dramatic increase in diversity and abundance of Welsh literature during the period 1790-1815. The volumes will be organized principally by genre (poetry, sermons, letters, and so on) and each volume will provide an in-depth critical introduction situating the material in its historical and literary context. An additional collection of essays, both literary and historical, by experts from inside and outside Wales will further explore the subject across a wide range of genres and themes (e.g. the presence of America, the role of translation, the London-Welsh networks). The on-going work of the project will be presented to the wider academic community by means of an international conference, and to the general public through a dedicated website.The research team will be led by an investigator with ten years' experience in the field of European Romanticism; she has recently headed a five-year project on the Welsh Romantic forger and radical, Iolo Morganwg. Her co-investigator is an eminent historian of Wales, who has, over three decades, published widely on the period. A strong advisory panel will include scholars with expertise in Welsh history and literature and leading writers on British Romanticism from outside Wales. Towards the end of the project a technical consultant will assist the team in presenting the results of their work in web form.From ballads and pamphlets to personal letters and prize-winning poems, essays, journals, sermons and satires, the range of texts covered by our project will make it a stimulating reflection of the complexity of the period. The Wales we expect to emerge from this study will be neither purely radical nor purely loyalist; neither exclusively Welsh nor yet wholly British. The implications of this work, moreover, go well beyond the immediate 'Four Nations' context of the British response to the Revolution. Our findings will provide further much-needed material for ongoing international research into the subtle interactions of regional, national and international constructions of identity during this extraordinarily formative period of European history.