Oxford Literary History of Wales

This book represents the longest single-volume work on modern Welsh literature ever published and proceeds from two broad perspectives. First avoiding the traditional intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to literary history as the story of literary forms authors other literatures or events <br>it places readers where possible at its centre. The definition of readers adopted here is broad: fictional and non-fictional derived from letters reviews and criticism as well as audiences addressed in prefaces those mediated through authors' consciousness or implied assumed postulated <br>created idealized chided encouraged and reviled and treated as experts or pupils arbiters or dupes. Welsh literature is approached not as the sequential product of authors writing under particular circumstances but as material interpreted and reinterpreted discovered and rediscovered by<br>reading communities across time. Second it seeks to interpret Welsh literature as shaped in turn by a series of concerns and preconceptions that have governed production and reception through most of the period covered in this book. These include for instance the fact that Welsh literature has<br>been read as a crisis of cultural communicability between writers and readers; that writers in a largely amateur literary culture have been regarded as benefactors; that there is a lack of material to read; that in a bilingual milieu there is an inescapable relationship between Welsh and English<br>literature; that a language with widely differing spoken and written registers is preoccupied with notions of correctness and appropriateness.