KATHRYN N. JONES, CAROL TULLY, & HEATHER WILLIAMS. 2020. Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation. (Re)Discoveries of Wales in Travel Writing in French and German (1780-2018)

Liverpool University Press, 304 p. ISBN: 978-1-78962-143-3.

Rezumat

Part of a joint project between Bangor University, Swansea University and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Hidden Texts, Hidden Nation is a timely book that focuses on Wales and the idea of Welshness, as depicted by French, Breton and German travellers from the latter half of the eighteenth century to contemporary times. Furthermore, it aims to unravel a nation which, much like Scotland and Ireland, has long been perceived and represented as marginal to the English imperial discourse. The authors’ rationale for the book is endorsed by the unfair treatment of Wales as a country with a “compromised” relationship with “its globally dominant neighbour”. However, despite the steadfast tendency to regard Wales as a part of England even during the post-devolution times, the nation has showcased not only its own language, social, cultural and political identity but also its specific legislation and education system. This line of thought enables the three authors to zoom in on Continental travel writing so as to reconfigure Wales as a nation radically different from both England and the European Celtic periphery. They successfully achieve their major goal by scrutinizing “the works of European travellers to Wales writing in languages other than English” with a view to erasing Wales’s “cultural ‘invisibility’”.