Posted on 30 April 2012
The French Revolution of 1789 was perhaps the defining event of the Romantic period in Europe. It unsettled not only the ordering of society but language and thought itself.
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.
Little has been written about the Welsh reaction to the French Revolution but published this month by the University of Wales Press, Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse, 1789-1802 by Marion Löffler looks to examine the printing culture and serial literature current in Wales at the time, and analyses its public discourse.
As part of the Wales and the French Revolution series, 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. All Welsh texts are translated, makings them accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
This selection of texts helps the reader place the voices and opinions from Wales within the British political context, yet it allows them to write their own history of this momentous decade in Wales.|
Dr Marion Löffler is a Research Fellow at the University of Wales Centre for Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth, Wales and at present she is part of the genre-based project on Wales and the French Revolution. Her research focuses on the interplay of language, history, culture and nationalism, the importance of the periodical press and public discourse for the development and exchange of ideas, and the creation of public memory through such public discourse.
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Notes to Editors:
(April 2012) Welsh Responses to the French Revolution: Press and Public Discourse, 1789-1802 by Marion Löffler
£24.99 •PB • 9780708324899 • 234x156 mm • 384pp - 4 Black and White Images
For more information on the University of Wales Press, or to place an order, visit: www.uwp.co.uk