To call this wide-ranging, detailed, and informative tome a “history of Welsh literature” is to sell it short: organized into six parts and comprising thirty-five meticulously researched chapters, the volume is nothing less than a literary, cultural, social, and political history of Wales from the departure of the Romans in 600 CE to the present day. Focusing on the broader notion of writing that engages with Welshness rather than canonical literature, the essays explore the symbiotic relationship between cultural production and politics, language, religion, economics, and social change. The chapters progress chronologically, but several of the same texts, figures, and pivotal events receive repeated attention at different points; while such an approach creates a sense of perspective, one cannot entirely escape the impression that the overlap results, at least in part, from the slimness of the literary pickings in certain periods. Within the bigger picture, three central and enduring pillars of Welsh culture and literature stand out across the centuries: the Mabinogion and the medieval literature of the marvelous; Nonconformism and scripture; and the Welsh language.

Part one takes the reader from the oldest surviving literature in Welsh, dating to about the ninth century, to the late medieval period. This is when the texts that still associate Wales with magic and the supernatural in the popular imagination were produced: poems in the Arthurian tradition contained in The Black Book of Carmarthen and Culhwch ac Olwen, the oldest surviving Welsh Arthurian prose text. While the dominant themes of the earliest strand of Welsh literature pertain to the antagonistic relationship between the various peoples on the island of Britain, the tales collectively known as the Mabinogion came to be read in the later Middle Ages as narratives of the past and future power of the Welsh kings, especially when the Wars of the Roses sparked the hope that a Welshman on the throne of England might unite the divided nation. Welsh court poetry flourished between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries: this era saw the establishment of literary networks of patrons, poets, and scribes that produced substantial anthologies of Welsh material, like the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest.

The two centuries following the Act of Union under Henry VIII are the focus of part two. Tudor reformations brought new benefits to the Welsh gentry but also led to the devaluing of the Welsh language and the gradual decline of the bardic order. The survival of the language was, however, aided by the translation of the scriptures into Welsh to help spread Protestantism in monolingual areas. Religion and the language dominated the landscape of cultural production, as Welsh grammars, dictionaries, and Bible translations took precedence over original creative writing. However, in seventeenth-century Tudor London, a strong Welsh presence produced many literary texts in English featuring Wales and Welsh characters.

Part three is concerned with the Methodist Revival and the rise of antiquarianism between 1700 and the mid-nineteenth century. An obsession with the past became the driving force behind much eighteenth-century literature, even as the Welsh language lost more ground. It was the diasporic community in London that oversaw the revitalization of the Eisteddfod (the bardic gathering) as a celebration of Welsh cultural expression. Works presented at the festival were collected in numerous literary anthologies, while the hugely influential publication of Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion’s four central tales created a new international audience for the literature of the Middle Ages. Meanwhile, Welsh Nonconformity had established its Calvinist and Evangelical ethos, which found popular and literary expression in a plethora of hymns, culminating in the 1860s in the development of the cymanfa ganu (hymn-singing festival). Moral themes like abolitionism and temperance dominated the Welsh novel as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, although women writers also employed the conventions of romance.

The chapters in part four consider the period up to 1945, when Wales witnessed increased industrialization, population growth, and Anglicization. Welsh poetry underwent a renaissance, turning away from the traditional formalist rules imposed by the Eisteddfod toward greater ambiguity in order to capture the sense of a fragmenting industrial community; nevertheless, modernism in Wales by and large expressed itself in political rather than formal radicalism. The novels and short stories of the twentieth century reflected the climate of economic growth and decay, industrial action, unemployment, and emigration. The work of Dylan Thomas, perhaps Wales’ best-known writer, is in a category of its own; characterized by a reliance on sound and the senses coupled with intellectual obscurantism, it has been called both Dickensian and Joycean. Although Thomas lived outside of Wales for much of his life, his 1953 radio play Under Milk Wood evocatively captured provincial Wales through the voices of more than seventy characters in the fictional town of Llareggub.

Addressing the second half of the twentieth century, the chapters in part five paint a picture of a “stateless” nation both culturally distinct and lacking in a unified “Welsh” identity; the contemporary literary emphasis consequently falls increasingly on heterogeneity and hybridity. At the same time, the “mystic Celtic past” remains a staple in popular fantasy literature and film both within and outside of Wales.

Moving from devolution up to the present moment, the chapters in part six assess how contemporary literature negotiates the meaning of Welshness and the position of Wales at a time when Brexit looms large and the very survival of the United Kingdom seems at stake. In that uncertain political context, the sweeping historical scope afforded by the Cambridge History of Welsh Literature offers a reassuring sense of cultural continuity—of a once and future Wales perpetually being reconstructed and reinvented in the literary imagination.