Reviewed by: Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons Julia M. Wright (bio) Sarah Prescott. Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. xxiv+206pp. £18.99. ISBN 978-0-7083-2053-2. This book is valuable not only for its major contribution to the recovery of eighteenth-century Welsh writing but also for its nuanced analysis of Welsh writers’ stance on the “four nations” problem. Sarah Prescott’s introduction is a deft and historically sensitive account of developments in discussions of this problem after J.G.A. Pocock’s groundbreaking 1975 “Plea” (“British History: A Plea for a New Subject,” Journal of Modern History 47 [December 1975]: 601–28), beginning with the historians, including Linda Colley, and then turning to the literary scholarship that followed. Prescott notes in particular Welsh writers’ tendency to read the union of Wales and England “as a reuniting of Britain rather than an appropriation of Wales by England” (111), the ways in which the Welsh antiquarian project served that vision by reinforcing the value of Welsh culture and history and seeking to preserve the Welsh language, and the significance of religion, both as cultural institution and as a rhetorical resource, to eighteenth-century Welsh writing. The first chapter is a close examination of the Welsh in London. As scholars are becoming increasingly aware, London was a generative site for the formation of national identity through the formal and informal expatriate clubs that met in the city (on terms that recall Benedict Anderson’s important essay, “Long-Distance Nationalism,” in [End Page 558] The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World [London: Verso, 1998], 58–74). Addressing in detail the London-based “Society of Ancient Britons,” Prescott traces the group’s position on the relation of Wales to Britain in terms of language, religion, and two national symbols, St David and the leek in particular, through a range of literary materials, from sermons to poems. This body of work suggests an uneasy ambivalence about Wales’s participation in the idea of Britain. On the one hand, these Welsh authors generally supported the existing regime, partly through “the providential message of Protestant British triumph” (7); on the other hand, they lamented the replacement of Welsh by English as the official language of Wales and worked to promote its preservation (9–13). The second chapter is a rich examination of the work of Jane Brereton, a poet clearly deserving of more critical attention for her literary merits and her engagement with national, class, and gender tensions. Prescott suggests, “it could be argued that Brereton’s commitment to the dynastic claims of the Hanoverian monarchs does not so much detract from her Welsh identity, but rather refracts this identity through a lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers” (31). This chapter is marked by such alternations between nature (“Welsh identity”) and culture (“lens of ‘Britishness’ familiar to Welsh writers”), as well as the hesitant phrasing of “it could be argued.” Such tension between Herderian nationalism, in which the nation determines individual character, and foundational literary critical ideas, in which authors are original and complex, often bedevils scholarship concerned with the recovery of Celtic-Periphery writing. This tension is also in the literature itself, and Prescott does much to introduce a richly suggestive poet who mediates between the cultural forms of dominant English culture and the icons of Welshness, such as distinctive landscapes and the figure of Merlin. Chapter 3 offers valuable insights into the antiquarian recuperation of the bard in the mid-eighteenth century, focussing on Evan Evans and suggesting that scholars to date have been too quick to see his “translations [as] mostly executed for an English audience” (58). Prescott considers instead the “combative motive for antiquarian recovery and memory” (59) outlined in the work of Katie Trumpener and Jane Aaron. In this context, Evans’s refusal to adapt his texts to normative English standards of taste and his representation of the bards as “freedom fighters” constitute a defiant gesture (59, 67). The core of this chapter is a critically well-situated discussion of Thomas Gray’s The Bard, in the context of the larger English co-optation...