Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: romancing the Celt
- 2 Sir William Jones, the Celtic Revival and the Oriental Renaissance
- 3 The critical response to Ossian's Romantic bequest
- 4 Blake and Gwendolen: territory, periphery and the proper name
- 5 The Welsh American dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend
- 6 Wordsworth, North Wales and the Celtic landscape
- 7 The force of ‘Celtic memories’ in Byron's thought
- 8 Shelley, Ireland and Romantic Orientalism
- 9 Byron and the ‘Ariosto of the North’
- 10 Scott and the British tourist
- 11 Felicia Hemans, Byronic cosmopolitanism and the ancient Welsh bards
- 12 Luttrell of Arran and the Romantic invention of Ireland
- 13 Contemporary Northern Irish poets and Romantic poetry
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - The Welsh American dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: romancing the Celt
- 2 Sir William Jones, the Celtic Revival and the Oriental Renaissance
- 3 The critical response to Ossian's Romantic bequest
- 4 Blake and Gwendolen: territory, periphery and the proper name
- 5 The Welsh American dream: Iolo Morganwg, Robert Southey and the Madoc legend
- 6 Wordsworth, North Wales and the Celtic landscape
- 7 The force of ‘Celtic memories’ in Byron's thought
- 8 Shelley, Ireland and Romantic Orientalism
- 9 Byron and the ‘Ariosto of the North’
- 10 Scott and the British tourist
- 11 Felicia Hemans, Byronic cosmopolitanism and the ancient Welsh bards
- 12 Luttrell of Arran and the Romantic invention of Ireland
- 13 Contemporary Northern Irish poets and Romantic poetry
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Walter Savage Landor once remarked patronisingly of Bristol, ‘I know of no mercantile place so literary.’ But it was precisely because the largest British metropolis outside London at the beginning of the eighteenth century was the gateway to imperial trade, that Bristol produced writers engaged in questioning both colonialism and the industrial revolution whose capital investment derived from the profits of that empire. Tumultuous Bristol was famous equally for its riots and for the self-defeating conservatism of its Corporation. West-Country Dissenters and Evangelicals campaigned against its slave trade and a vigorous peace movement opposed the war against revolutionary France until 1797. This context favoured poetry inspired by that turn, which heralded British ‘Romanticism’, away from Enlightenment narratives of the inevitable progress of reason, commerce and civilisation. Turning away also from the classical genres and styles associated with the Roman empire on which Britain modelled herself and which therefore formed the basis of male ruling-class education, the new poetry demonstrated sympathy instead with primitive or vernacular cultures which had been or were in the process of being superseded.
Thomas Chatterton steeped himself in the Middle Ages, forging for Bristol the romance of her own pre-industrial past. Hannah More was another Bristolian mimic whose anti-Paineite Village Politics (1792) by carpenter ‘Will Chip’ ventriloquised the vernacular broadsheets of pedlars. Her one-time protégée, the Bristol milkwoman Ann Yearsley, the genuine working-class article, wrote as ‘Lactilla’, challenging the assumptions of Virgilian pastoral.
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- English Romanticism and the Celtic World , pp. 69 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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