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‘Representing Wales as Utopia in the eighteenth-century novel’
Caroline Franklin 
Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution, Pages: 11 - 35
Swansea University Author:
Caroline Franklin
Abstract
This essay argues that in eighteenth-century fiction the principality without a metropolis embodied the pun in More's concept of a place which functioned as ideal yet nowhere: the tabula rasa where a blueprint for a new society could be imagined. It is well-known that Wales often featured in ei...
| Published in: | Footsteps of Liberty and Revolt: Essays on Wales and the French Revolution |
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| Published: |
Cardiff
University of Wales Press
2013
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| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa330 |
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| Abstract: |
This essay argues that in eighteenth-century fiction the principality without a metropolis embodied the pun in More's concept of a place which functioned as ideal yet nowhere: the tabula rasa where a blueprint for a new society could be imagined. It is well-known that Wales often featured in eighteenth-century fiction, but this essay argues that the ubiquity of picturesque tours and the propensity of sentimentalism towards romantic primitivism were not the only explanations. Wales was also a premier site of technical and industrial innovation in the 1780s: a wilderness about to be transformed by modernity either for good or bad. Novels by Robert Bage, William Godwin, Anna Maria Bennett and Charlotte Smith used Welsh settings and characters specifically to debate the aesthetic and social questions posed by exploitation by outsiders of another culture and way of life. Wales would also be the prototype for the future of entrepreneurs and socal projectors. It was all potentiality as the empty land at the heart of Britain: west of England, south of Scotland, and east of Ireland. Historical romance like Godwin's Imogen idealized the egalitarian way of life of the ancient Britons now under threat, while courtship novels of the present day represented Wales as a vulnerable orphan girl deprived of autonomy or inheritance. |
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| Keywords: |
Utopia, Wales, eighteenth-century, fiction, novels |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
11 |
| End Page: |
35 |