“It’ll be our own little Wales out there”: re-situating Bardsey Island for post-devolution Wales in Fflur Dafydd’s Twenty Thousand Saints

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Fflur Dafydd’s 2008 novel Twenty Thousand Saints negotiates notions of the island space in a post-devolution Welsh context. It argues that the novel is a rich site in the analysis of the literary dimension of what Baldacchino describes as the “island-mainland […] dialectic” (Baldacchino, 2006, p. 10). Set on Bardsey, a real small island off the coast of north Wales, the novel employs a multiple-character narrative to explore and critique the various ways in which Bardsey has been constructed in the Welsh cultural imagination. In particular, the novel explores the idea of the island as a queer space. It does so in a way that posits Bardsey in dialectical relation to an ongoing, politically dynamic Welsh mainland. The article suggests that the novel can be read as a mainland appropriation of the island in the post-devolution era. Yet this is simultaneously an enabling imaginative act that confirms the power of literature to create new imaginative geographies.