An industrious academic and charmingly eccentric Romantic poet and forger, Iolo Morganwg (1747-1846) left behind a floor-to-ceiling stack of unpublished manuscripts in his small Welsh cottage. A Rattleskull Genius, based on that trove of unpublished material now held at the National Library of Wales, provides both a celebration and a critical reassessment of the author and his contributions to Welsh cultural tradition.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The previous two volumes of this acclaimed anthology set forth a globally decentered revision of twentieth-century poetry from the perspective of its many avant-gardes. Now editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.

Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised.

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.

Writing Welsh History is the first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years. By analysing and contextualizing a wide range of historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, it opens new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh - and thus on the use of the past to articulate national and other identities. The study's broad chronological scope serves to highlight important continuities in interpretations of Welsh history. One enduring preoccupation is Wales's place in Britain. Down to the twentieth century it was widely held that the Welsh were an ancient people descended from the original inhabitants of Britain whose history in its fullest sense ended with Edward I's conquest of Wales in 1282-4, their history thereafter being regarded as an attenuated appendix. However, Huw Pryce shows that such master narratives, based on medieval sources and focused primarily on the period down to 1282, were part of a much larger and more varied historiographical landscape. Over the past century the thematic and chronological range of Welsh history writing has expanded significantly, notably in the unprecedented attention given to the modern period, reflecting broader trends in an increasingly internationalized historical profession as well as the influence of social, economic, and political developments in Wales and elsewhere.

"By investigating Romantic-era negotiations of Welsh culture both by writers seeking to further the assimilation of the Welsh, and by those seeking to protect and preserve a distinctive cultural identity for the Welsh, this book traces the effects of differing historiographic approaches to identity formation, allowing for a better understanding of how cultural material can be productively reworked in order to gain a specific end."--BOOK JACKET.