The first volume in the new series Gender Studies in Wales, this book argues that the way in which people came to perceive and to represent themselves as Welsh was profoundly affected by the gender ideologies prevalent during the Romantic and Victorian periods. "Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity" introduces readers to a hundred Welsh women authors at work during the years 1780-1900, some writing in Welsh and some in English. In so doing, it rescues many of these authors from critical neglect and oblivion. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, Welsh women writers in both languages were numerous and enjoyed a degree of influence on Welsh culture easily commensurate with that of women writers today. By covering the nineteenth century chronologically, this book traces the coming into being of the Welsh nation as its women in particular saw it, and as they helped to create it.

• Offers a broad yet detailed exploration of Lynette Roberts’s writing, encompassing poetry, prose, and radio broadcasts. It will thus benefit students and scholars by offering the knowledge base and theoretical starting points that they need in order to launch their own investigations. It will benefit teachers by offering a much-needed sourcebook on Roberts’s life and work. • Throws light on the interesting cultural relationship between Wales and Argentina. • Essays arranged in chronological order allow readers to trace the evolution of Roberts’s style in the context of British and Welsh social and cultural history. • It brings together the most recent and original research on Lynette Roberts since 2005. • Flags up Lynette Roberts’s wider relevance to Welsh/British literary history and key developments in literary and cultural studies.

The first full account of the life and work of a nineteenth-century woman who carved out a unique career as an important writer in English on Welsh subjects. It is a major contribution to history of women’s writing in English. It is also a major contribution to knowledge of Welsh Writing in English in the nineteenth century.

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.

This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.