Footsteps of 'Liberty and Revolt'

Essays on Wales and the French Revolution

Mary-Ann Constantine, Dafydd Johnston

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780708325902
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783160433
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

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 Drawing on a wealth of vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished, this collection marks another important contribution to four nations criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and flashpoints of Romantic-period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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Wales and the French Revolution
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Writing the Revolution in Wales
• Wales as Nowhere: the tabula rasa of the ‘Jacobin’ imagination
• Rousseau and Wales
• ‘Our first concern as lovers of our country must be to enlighten it’: Richard Price’s response to the French Revolution
• The Welsh in Revolutionary Paris
• The ‘Marseillaise’ in Wales
• The ‘Rural Voltaire’ and the ‘French madcaps’
• Networking the nation: the bardic and correspondence networks of Wales and London in the 1790s
• Radical adaptation: translations of medieval Welsh poetry in the 1790s
• ‘Brave Republicans’: representing the Revolution in a Welsh interlude
• ‘A good Cambrio-Briton’: Hester Thrale Piozzi, Helen Maria Williams and the Welsh sublime in the 1790s1
• What is a national Gothic?
• Terror, treason and tourism: the French in Pembrokeshire 1797
• The voices of war: poetry from Wales 1794–1804
• The Revd William Howels (1778–1832) of Cowbridge and London: the making of an anti-radical