“Sweet Sylvan Routes” and Grave Methodists: Wales in De Quincey's 'Confessions of an English Opium-Eater'

Wales and the Romantic Imagination is the first collection devoted exclusively to the figuring of Wales by both native inhabitants and visitors in Romantic-period writing. Wales was a crucial site for the Romantic imagination, yet there has been no sustained investigation of the wide range of responses to its landscape, history and culture. Examining the work of canonical and non-canonical writers in a variety of genres, the volume reveals the forms in which Wales resisted, succumbed to and embraced appropriation. It breaks new ground by countering the critical marginalisation of Wales in accounts of the formation of British Romanticism. At a time when a monolithic cultural model is being superseded by the plural Romanticisms of the ‘four nations’, the twelve essays in this book are concerned both to locate ‘Romantic Wales’ more centrally and to devolve it. This move involves a sharper awareness of complex cultural allegiances in an international context, and a more precise understanding of the relation between Romanticism and national identity, politics, the imperial project, print culture and gender