This book is a comprehensive single-volume history of literature in the two major languages of Wales from post-Roman to post-devolution Britain.

• Offers a broad yet detailed exploration of Lynette Roberts’s writing, encompassing poetry, prose, and radio broadcasts. It will thus benefit students and scholars by offering the knowledge base and theoretical starting points that they need in order to launch their own investigations. It will benefit teachers by offering a much-needed sourcebook on Roberts’s life and work. • Throws light on the interesting cultural relationship between Wales and Argentina. • Essays arranged in chronological order allow readers to trace the evolution of Roberts’s style in the context of British and Welsh social and cultural history. • It brings together the most recent and original research on Lynette Roberts since 2005. • Flags up Lynette Roberts’s wider relevance to Welsh/British literary history and key developments in literary and cultural studies.

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.