“Venerable Relics of Ancient Lore”

As England’s first colony, home to a rich literary tradition and a still-thriving minority language community, Wales stands as a valuable example of how premodern traditions can and should inflect modern studies of postcolonial and world literatures. This study maps how medieval, postcolonial, and world literary studies have intersected thus far and presents a reading of the medieval Welsh Mabinogion as postcolonial world literature. Specifically, I read the postcolonial refrain as a deeply-entrenched characteristic of traditional Welsh literature, manifesting in the Mabinogion tale of the brothers Lludd and Llefelys and a related poetic triad, the “Teir Gormes” (Three Oppressions). Through analysis of the context and reception of Lady Charlotte Guest’s English translation of Welsh materials, I then theorize traditional Welsh material as postcolonial, colonizing, and worlding literature.

The Cambridge History of Welsh Literature, ed. Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, xxix, 825 pp., 8 maps

According to the two editors, it has been a long time since the entire history of Welsh literature was treated in one volume, so the new effort by Geraint Evans and Helen Fulton must be certainly welcomed. But for a little housekeeping, so to speak, they only refer to the volume Hanes Llenyddiaeth Gymraeg hyd 1900, published by Thomas Parry in 1953, translated into English in 1955. A simple search in any online catalog, however, unearths other valuable studies, such as Bobi Jones’s The Dragon’s Pen: A Brief History of Welsh Literature (1986), Mathias Roland’s Anglo-Welsh Literature: An Illustrated History (1986), The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, ed. Meic Stephens (1986), and Dafydd Johnston, The Literature of Wales (1994), none of which are included in the final cumulative bibliography. Of course, this does not mean at all that new efforts in that regard could be dismissed, on the contrary. In fact, as Evans and Fulton correctly emphasize, both with respect to the use of English and the use of Welsh, the time has come to approach the entire corpus of literary texts as produced in Wales from the early Middle Ages until today in a holistic fashion, although this work was here divvied up among a larger number of scholars responsible for individual literary-historical periods. It would have been helpful, however, if the editors had reviewed critically the previous efforts to write a literary history of Wales in order to highlight better the new approaches and methodologies, which are explained subsequently, but not clearly enough in contrast to previous publications.