Wales Unchained

‘A dazzling read. Daniel G. Williams takes us on a tour which leads to fresh perspectives on Welshness. Familiar themes – language, society, cultural identity – are convincingly reworked. Familiar personalities – Dylan Thomas, Aneurin Bevan – are compellingly redefined. An invaluable guide to the making of the modern Welsh identity.’
–Huw Edwards, journalist, broadcaster and newsreader.

‘Wales Unchained is an attractive, remarkably well-informed and well-argued collection by one of Wales’s leading scholars in cultural criticism. This book breaks genuine new ground in Welsh and transatlantic studies, both in its approaches and in the depth and detail of its research. While the individual essays draw on a rich variety of theoretical material, the book wears its theory lightly and deserves a readership well beyond the academic world. Anyone interested in the pasts and possible futures of ‘Welshness’ should read this book.’
–Professor Tony Brown, Bangor University

‘If James Joyce believed that “the best road to Tara is through Holyhead”, then Daniel G. Williams shows how some of the best roads to Holyhead ran through transatlantic culture. Bringing postcolonial theory, multiculturalism and a series of deep contextual readings to bear on questions of Welsh identity, Williams traces with considerable verve how transatlantic crossings cleared spaces where class and culture, Labourism and nationalism, could meet. In this two-way flow, the complexities of Wales, at once inside and outside metropolitan British culture, also open up roads not taken in contemporary debates, challenging many received critical pieties regarding nation, globalisation and cultural identity.’
–Professor Luke Gibbons, National University of Ireland, Maynooth