"Some Specimens of the Poetry of the Ancient Welsh Bards" is a collection of poems by the Welsh literature critic Evan Evans. Evans offers the poems with explanatory notes on the historical passages, and a short account of men and places mentioned by the bards. They were sourced from a manuscript of the learned Dr. Davies, author of the Welsh Dictionary, which he had transcribed from an ancient volume which was written, partly in Edward the Second and Third's times, and partly in Henry the Fifth's, containing the works of all the Bards from the Conquest to the death of Llewelyn, the famed Welsh Ruler.

This book offers a radical new theory of the role of poetry in the rise of cultural nationalism. With equal attention to England, Scotland, and Wales, the book takes an Archipelagic approach to the study of poetics, print media, and medievalism in the rise of British Romanticism. It tells the story of how poets and antiquarian editors in the British nations rediscovered forgotten archaic poetic texts and repurposed them as the foundation of a new concept of the nation, now imagined as a primarily cultural formation. It also draws on legal and ecclesiastical history in drawing a sharp contrast between early modern and Romantic antiquarianisms. Equally a work of literary criticism and history, the book offers provocative new theorizations of nationalism and Romanticism and new readings of major British poets, including Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gray, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The first volume in the new series Gender Studies in Wales, this book argues that the way in which people came to perceive and to represent themselves as Welsh was profoundly affected by the gender ideologies prevalent during the Romantic and Victorian periods. "Nineteenth-Century Women's Writing in Wales: Nation, Gender and Identity" introduces readers to a hundred Welsh women authors at work during the years 1780-1900, some writing in Welsh and some in English. In so doing, it rescues many of these authors from critical neglect and oblivion. In the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, Welsh women writers in both languages were numerous and enjoyed a degree of influence on Welsh culture easily commensurate with that of women writers today. By covering the nineteenth century chronologically, this book traces the coming into being of the Welsh nation as its women in particular saw it, and as they helped to create it.