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Iniquity, Terror and Survival: Welsh Gothic, 1789‐1804 1
Author(s) -
EDWARDS ELIZABETH
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1754-0208.2011.00415.x
Subject(s) - welsh , theme (computing) , period (music) , history , jacobin , literature , colonialism , french revolution , art , ancient history , law , archaeology , political science , aesthetics , politics , computer science , operating system
Literary critics have recently begun to draw attention to ‘national Gothic’, outlining the importance of themes of conflict and defeated and victorious histories in this form of the Gothic. The contested and unsettled history of Wales provides the perfect conditions for a national Gothic, yet little work has yet been done towards the notion of a specifically Welsh Gothic in the period following the French revolution. This article explores four variations on the theme of writing Gothic in revolution‐era Wales: a tourist Gothic, a Jacobin Gothic, a loyalist Gothic and a post‐colonial Gothic. It shows how writers of this period used the conflicts and iniquities of the Welsh past equally to illustrate Wales's incorporation within a larger united Britain and to figure its otherness, its familiar difference, relative to its historical enemy – England.