Looking towards India: Nativism and Orientalism in the Literature of Wales, 1300-1600

After the conquest of 1282, Wales increasingly fell under the dominion of England and in 1535, the first Laws in Wales Act officially annexed the country. During this period of political and legal instability, Welsh men and women fought to regain independence, a struggle that led to the development of a nascent national identity. For many authors, this identity was fundamentally rooted in the topography of Wales and the mythical histories concerning the cultivation of its land. This interest in native mirabilia corresponded with a period of increased availability of English and continental geographical treatises and travelogues that provided Welsh authors with a new vocabulary for discussing wonder. Medieval and early modern Welsh authors incorporated these exotic geographies into their accounts of native landscapes in order to differentiate Wales from England and argue for a sense of Welsh cultural exceptionalism based in its alterity. The strange and marvelous played an invaluable role in Welsh writing and English writing about Wales from late Middle Ages onward. While English authors employed orientalized and racialized rhetoric to justify the annexation of Wales under an English throne, Welsh authors availed themselves of the same imagery to establish Welsh political and cultural autonomy. In this dissertation, I trace the development of this phenomenon in the romance literature of the Middle Ages and analyze its influence on a wide variety of early modern genres, including historiography, drama, and poetry. I demonstrate the ways in which Tudor Welsh and English authors portrayed Wales as the source of historical, linguistic, and cultural marvel. By doing so, these authors argue for a Wales whose marvelous, and at times threatening, landscape separates it from England and, thus, protects it from English hegemony.