Chapter 3 introduces a new genre of fiction, the Wales novel. Wales novels were set in the Principality, featured Welsh heroines and heroes, and cast Wales as simultaneously the morally and culturally pure cradle of imperial Britishness and, paradoxically, as Britain’s first and final colony. In them, the country becomes the proposed space for experimentation with new methods of colonial discipline and extraction and the site of a proposed recolonization of the British heartland that promised to reinvigorate and purify the Empire as a whole. These fictions, written or satirized by all of the decade’s most famous novelists, were among the best-selling and most critically celebrated works of the period. The chapter concludes with an investigation of the critical reception and generic influence of the Wales novel in the late 1780s, spotlighting several exceptionally interesting deviations from the rapidly consolidating hallmarks of the genre.

Chapter 4 shows how, as the Wales novel congealed into a stable genre, it began to confront the knotty problem of race. The notorious economic underdevelopment of Wales posed a problem to Scottish Enlightenment-inspired anthropologists who cast climate and religion as the determinants of standardized, stadial socioeconomic progress. Such theories failed to account for the wealth gap between Wales and England, since Wales’s climate was mostly identical to England’s and Wales had come to be understood as the heartland of British Protestantism. As authors struggled to explain Welsh impoverishment, they became increasingly willing to use race to figure the Welsh as different from Anglo-Britons in kind, rather than in degree of social development. Some authors contended that the Welsh were “negroes,” “savages,” and “men of copper,” who deviated from a phenotypically white Britishness, while others insisted they were the progenitors of a pure race destined to rule the world.

Chapter 5 explores the conspicuous absence of a Romantic Welsh national novel patterned after the fictions of Maria Edgeworth and Walter Scott. Reading over a dozen “failed” attempts at producing such books, the chapter argues that the unique position of Wales did not furnish it with the materials necessary for a conventional bardic nationalist novel. Edgeworth’s and Scott’s spectacular commodification of national cultural difference could not be made to work in the Welsh case. Where Edgeworth’s Irish and Scott’s Scottish trade politically independent but doomed identities for a cultural nationalism that is, above all, reconcilable with a capacious imperial Britishness, the Welsh had no such option, since Welshness was and had been synonymous with (ancient) Britishness for centuries. What was at stake in Welsh national fictions was instead the definition of Britishness itself.

Chapter 2 demonstrates that the Principality played a key role in the invention of novel understandings of the history of the British Empire. While historians like David Hume linked modern Wales with pre-Roman Britain in order to confer upon modern Britain a dubious anti-colonial pedigree, and to equate Britishness with a love of liberty, they also figured the English conquest of Wales as a necessary precondition for the establishment of British imperial power. Seizing upon this hypocrisy, antiquaries like Henry Rowlands insisted that the English were foreign interlopers who had nearly destroyed native British culture. Midcentury writers like Thomas Gray and Edmund Burke sought to suture this rift by contending that ancient Britain, and its modern descendant Wales, were crucial political and aesthetic resources for Britain’s imperial future, but some Jacobins, like Iolo Morganwg, instead portrayed Wales as an insurgent anti-imperial power waiting to unmake the British Empire from within.

Chapter 3 considers T. S. Eliot and Lynette Roberts together as authors who develop major long poems in response to the violence and mechanization of World War II. While Eliot and Roberts carried on significant correspondence during this period, almost nothing has been written about the relationship between their poetry. In the face of wartime desolation, both offer fragmentary images of a submerged national past: the spiritual sanctuary of Little Gidding for Eliot; the buried dragon of the Welsh nation for Roberts. Alongside these images of potential national revival, both consider the possibility of transcendence, while still identifying with the political disarray of their chosen nations.

This chapter traces the progression of nationalist writing in Wales and Scotland from the Popular Front fiction of the 1930s through to the devolved nations of the twenty-first century. Raymond Williams’s changing position on the nationalist question is charted and related to the work of the political theorist Tom Nairn. Williams is further analysed in the second half of the chapter as an indicative case study of a creative writer who drew on the legacy of the 1930s writers in order to tackle the centralist tendencies of English literature. In the process, Williams himself became a protagonist in the devolution struggle and is portrayed as such in John Osmond’s Ten Million Stars Are Burning (2018). The chapter concludes by discussing why documentary approaches, such as Osmond’s novel and James Robertson’s And the Land Lay Still (2010), are important to the fictional representations of the struggle for Welsh and Scottish independence.

Surveying a range of literary texts written in the vernacular languages of medieval Britain, this chapter is concerned with the ways in which the peoples of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales defined themselves in opposition to the dominant state power of England. Countering the Latin historical tradition which positioned British history as English history, writers working in Irish, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh constructed origin myths and literary traditions that worked to build local communities and regional identities. Though the territories clustered around England were far from united in their political structures, they came together as peoples to resist the imperial ambitions of the English state.

In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

This chapter focuses mainly on travel writing from inside Wales, describing some of the ways in which these narratives record encounters that challenged and often transformed regional and parochial identities. Such travel narratives written from the inside place more emphasis on geography – on the landscape, the contours of the regions, the topographical boundaries and markers – than on the people within. The more frequent and more specific the place-names mentioned in a text, the more familiar the region is to the writers who map the terrain of their own homelands. In contrast, examples of accounts of travel into Wales from the outside exemplify the kinds of stereotypical and colonialist thinking about Wales and the Welsh people that kept it subject to the hegemonic power of England. From the outside, Wales is an undifferentiated land typically constructed as mysterious, even rebarbative, hostile to outsiders and difficult to navigate, while the Welsh themselves are untrustworthy and belligerent rebels whose very existence threatens the unity of the English kingdom.

While Shelley produced many of his most important works in self-imposed exile from Great Britain, various locales in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales played an important role in his personal and poetic development. Attending to Shelley’s experiences across Great Britain and Ireland, and to local sociopolitical dynamics in the places where he lived and worked, this chapter traces some formative influences upon his later poems and essays. It finds that Shelley’s political and aesthetic maturation owed much to his geographical and institutional surroundings and illuminates how these surroundings contributed to his alienation, radicalisation, and visionary zeal.

As a theology student in North Wales, Gerard Manley Hopkins immersed himself in Welsh landscapes and the Welsh language; in so doing, he developed his distinctive poetic idiom. Yet Hopkins’s responses to Wales are also charged with political and psychological complexities. Wales has a deep, contested history of invention and reinvention, and Hopkins is part of a tradition of writers who have performed identity against the backdrop of an ideological Welsh landscape. Hopkins’s bardic nom de plume, ‘Brân Maenefa’ – the name with which he signed ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – has often been understood as a jest, but it is better understood as a psychic-aesthetic identity, one whose performance gave Hopkins permission to pursue a poetic vocation. Wales was Hopkins’s ‘mother of Muses’ because he required Wales, and in a sense created Wales, as a m/otherland that, by virtue of its alterity, could mother-forth a unique poetic identity.

This chapter focuses on changes in language policy in Wales between the 1960s and the present. The discussion illustrates how drawing on the concept of state tradition can help to explain why it has been possible for a general policy trajectory that has been increasingly supportive of the Welsh language to emerge during this period. However, the chapter argues that the concept of state tradition seems somewhat constrained in explaining more specific and detailed episodes in the development of language policy in Wales over recent decades. In particular, it is less able to explain why specific policies were adopted at particular junctures. Building on this, the chapter contributes to the volume by demonstrating how the insights of the state traditions and language regimes framework could be deepened if supplemented with a more explicit focus on how institutional factors across multiple levels of government can shape language policy choices, particularly in relation to regional or minority languages such as Welsh.

This chapter presents on overview of present-day Welsh English(es) with a focus on regional variation and diachronic developments over the past fifty years. The Anglicisation of Wales has progressed in several phases over the centuries, which is why the accents and dialects of English in Wales are regionally distinctive, the Welsh language and neighbouring English English dialects impacting them to different degrees. The chapter takes the Survey of Anglo-Welsh dialects (Parry 1999) as a starting point and uses corpus and survey data compiled in the twenty-first century as well as recent research publications, thereby examining the main trends of development in the different domains of English. Phonological variation and change are described across a broad North–South continuum, whereas in morphosyntax the greatest differences can be found between the predominantly English-speaking Southeast and the bilingual, historically Welsh-dominant North and West Wales. In regional lexicon, sociolinguistically and nationally salient items are relatively few, originating from both Welsh and English. Finally, the chapter draws attention to recent research, and highlights some caveats and future directions for the study of English in Wales.

International pressures, Brexit and the resurgence of nationalism have created new divides in the regions of the United Kingdom. Brendan O’Leary examines the impact of Conservative policy in Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales, focusing on how prime ministers have handled campaigns and support for Scottish independence, the ruling coalitions in Wales, and also the new post-Brexit framework and demographic pressures in Northern Ireland. The chapter ends with a dire overall evaluation of the condition of the union as a result of Conservative policy.