‘Skillfully assembled . . . invaluable collection . . . added bonus of this captivating collection is the elegant and incisive essay with which Daniel Williams introduces the volume. Here, in a sure-footed display of scholarship and engagement . . . exceptionally stimulating . . . admirable book . . . ’
New Welsh Review
‘ . . . meticulously assembled and perceptively introduced. . . ’ Planet
‘…stands as an outstandingly rich resource…[the Editor]…does an excellent and meticulous job of filling in the bibliographical and historical details…Here are two important new books on culture, identity, diversity and social change in Wales, opening up new critical perspectives based on political, demographic, sociological and literary research.’ Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development
In the words of Cornel West, Raymond Williams was ‘the last of the great European male revolutionary socialist intellectuals’. A figure of international importance in the fields of literary criticism and social theory, Williams was also preoccupied throughout his life with the meaning and significance of his Welsh identity.
Who Speaks for Wales? is the first collection of Raymond Williams’ writings on Welsh culture, literature, history and politics. It brings together material that has long been overlooked by commentators on his work, and emphasizes both the centrality of his Welshness to his work as a whole, and the continuing relevance of his thought for post-devolution Wales.
Daniel Williams’s introduction offers an original reading of Raymond Williams’s thought from a Welsh perspective and underlines the ways in which his engagement with Welsh issues makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on nationalism and ethnicity. Who Speaks for Wales? will be essential reading for everyone interested in questions of identity, nationhood and ethnicity in Britain and beyond.
‘Where is the real identity, the real culture?’ Raymond Williams asks in this book. At a time when the European Union is strengthening supranational and regional ties and the Left is trying make sense of various particularistic identities, Williams’s ‘Welsh-European’ writing, his ‘regionally shaded’ cultural critique, deserves the widest attention. Daniel Williams who has here edited the whole corpus of Williams’s Welsh-focused non-fiction writings, book reviews, interviews, and fugitive pieces, also presents, in the introduction, a convincing defence of Raymond Williams against such critics as Edward Said and Paul Gilroy and a cogent rationale for Williams’s continuing significance. Anyone interested in literary-historical criticism from the Left, in the issues of Welshness and of the tradition of a border country within the “Yookay” specifically, or in the problems of regional and national identity generally, will want to read Who Speaks for Wales?’
Werner Sollors, author of Beyond Ethnicity and Neither Black Nor White Yet Both
Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was for many years Staff Tutor with the Oxford University Extra-Mural Delegacy until his election in 1961 as Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1974 he was appointed Professor of Drama at Cambridge. He died in 1988.
Daniel Williams is Lecturer in English Literature and Assistant Director of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales at the University of Wales, Swansea. He has published widely on questions of national and ethnic identity, particularly in relation to British and American literatures.
Contents
AcknowledgementsThe Black Domain4. Remaking Welsh History
Putting the Welsh in their Place
The Shadow of the Dragon