Wales, Romanticism, and the Making of Imperial Culture [Hardcover]

Timothy Heimlich casts Wales as a crucial rhetorical battleground in the campaign to reinvent Britishness for a new imperial era.This ambitious study argues that in the long eighteenth century the meanings of Britain and Britishness, once synonymous with Wales, transformed. It opens paradigm-shifting insight into the influences of empire and imperialism upon British literary production, engaging in debates around imperialism both internally and abroad.This ambitious study argues that in the long eighteenth century the meanings of Britain and Britishness, once synonymous with Wales, transformed. It opens paradigm-shifting insight into the influences of empire and imperialism upon British literary production, engaging in debates around imperialism both internally and abroad.At the beginning of the long eighteenth century, the adjective 'British' primarily meant Welsh, in a narrow and exclusive sense. As the nation and the empire expanded, so too did Britishness come to name a far more diffuse identity. In parallel with this transformation, writers sought to invent a?new British literary tradition. Timothy Heimlich demonstrates that these developments were more interrelated than scholars have yet realized, revealing how Wales was both integral to and elided from Britishness at the same historical moment that it was becoming a vitally important cultural category. Critically re-examining the role of nationalism in the development of colonized identities and complicating the core-periphery binary, he sheds new light on longstanding critical debates about internal colonialism and its relationship to the project of empire-building abroad.Introduction: reinventing Britishness; 1. Wales and the imperial Gaze, 17261800; 2. Ancient Britons and ancient Britains: writing British history, 17231803; 3. The Colonial heartland: the double role of Wales in 1780s fiction; 4. The other within: racializing Welshness, 17901799; 5. 'A perfect Potosi': Wales and imperial Britishness in tlS¡