Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- 32 The Seventies and the cult of culture
- 33 Feminism and writing: the politics of culture
- 34 The half-lives of literary fictions: genre fictions in the late twentieth century
- 35 Theatre and politics
- 36 Irish literature: tradition and modernity
- 37 Scottish literature: Second Renaissance
- 38 Towards devolution: new Welsh writing
- 39 British–Jewish Writing and the turn towards diaspora
- 40 Fiction and postmodernity
- 41 Postcolonial fictions
- 42 Writing lives
- 43 Poetry after 1970
- 44 Ending the century: literature and digital technology
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
38 - Towards devolution: new Welsh writing
from PART FIVE - TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- PART ONE WRITING MODERNITY
- PART TWO THE EMERGING AVANT-GARDE
- PART THREE MODERNISM AND ITS AFTERMATH, 1918–1945
- PART FOUR POST-WAR CULTURES, 1945–1970
- PART FIVE TOWARDS THE MILLENNIUM, 1970–2000
- 32 The Seventies and the cult of culture
- 33 Feminism and writing: the politics of culture
- 34 The half-lives of literary fictions: genre fictions in the late twentieth century
- 35 Theatre and politics
- 36 Irish literature: tradition and modernity
- 37 Scottish literature: Second Renaissance
- 38 Towards devolution: new Welsh writing
- 39 British–Jewish Writing and the turn towards diaspora
- 40 Fiction and postmodernity
- 41 Postcolonial fictions
- 42 Writing lives
- 43 Poetry after 1970
- 44 Ending the century: literature and digital technology
- Bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
Wales is a small country, with two linguistic cultures, which, as a nation, has survived into the third millennium by the skin of its teeth. About a quarter of its 2.75 million inhabitants – only 5 per cent of the UK population as a whole – were not born in Wales, and accordingly are unlikely to have a strong sense of allegiance to it. While two-thirds of Scots identify themselves as Scottish as opposed to British, in a 1999 survey only 43 per cent of Welsh respondents saw themselves as Welsh first and foremost. Apart from a brief period of industrial prosperity during the early years of the twentieth century, it has remained one of the poorest areas in the UK, its household incomes at 10 per cent below those of the UK generally, and its output per head, in terms of GDP, currently standing at about 82 per cent of the UK average. Since its Anglo-Norman conquest in the thirteenth century, it has had few national institutions to mark its distinctiveness, apart from an indigenous language in steep decline during the twentieth century: the figures for Welsh-language speakers dropped from 54.4 per cent of the Welsh population in 1891 to 18.7 per cent in 1991. The long struggle to save the language from extinction in itself causes internal division in Wales, with some of the non-Welsh speaking majority seeing little purpose in spending scarce resources on keeping alive a culture they have already lost.
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- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature , pp. 685 - 699Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005