Claiming Cambria

"This book examines the role of history in the construction of communal, culturally based identities. Working with the dynamic period of the Romantic era, the author traces variant attitudes toward history that enabled writers to cast Wales and the Welsh into specific cultural roles. During this time, when the validity of maintaining that the Welsh had a right to retain their identity as a culturally distinct people was seriously questioned, literary invocations of the past played an important role in articulating the relationship between Wales and Great Britain.". "By investigating Romantic-era negotiations of Welsh culture both by writers seeking to further the assimilation of the Welsh, and by those seeking to protect and preserve a distinctive cultural identity for the Welsh, this book traces the effects of differing historiographic approaches to identity formation, allowing for a better understanding of how cultural material can be productively reworked in order to gain a specific end."--BOOK JACKET.