By M. Wynn Thomas
Because the earliest days of language, writers and preachers were locked in a fight for energy and authority. within the Shadow of the Pulpit exhibits how that fight has been on the middle of Welsh writing for greater than centuries, in detail shaping the English-language literature produced in Wales in that point. It lines the transforming into literary reaction to the facility of Welsh Nonconformity from the eighteenth century onwards, and it additionally uncovers an entire new physique of nineteenth-century fiction from Wales.
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Extra resources for In the shadow of the pulpit: literature and nonconformist Wales
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If one had been saved, was a fall from grace possible, and if so how? What kind of sacrament was the Eucharist – what was the meaning of the bread and wine? Were images allowable? Or music? If God dealt unpredictably with individuals, couldn’t He visit His grace on women as well as men? And didn’t His unforeseeable actions make a mockery of social distinctions? If reading the Bible was the sole route to Christ, then what about those who could not read Latin Scripture? Or could not read at all? And what of those who could, but whose understanding differed from that of Luther?
Alternatively, one might say they turned Nonconformity’s most powerful weapon – rhetoric – against itself. The obsessive, repetitive, ferocity of their onslaught is reminiscent of the Russian aristocracy’s desperate attempts to dispose, terminally, of Rasputin. Nineteenth-century Nonconformity was truly hegemonic, colouring consciousness and not just institutionally dominant. Such a powerful psychic hold did it continue to exert, long after its theological and institutional power had waned, that it could appear to be unkillable.
28 Such developments directly reflected the growing challenge from the vigorous, colourful mass-entertainment culture produced by industrial society, including popular sports and the new seductive technology of film. But they also emphasized how Nonconformity had become part of the very weave of industrial society, its lifestyle cut from exactly the same cloth. No wonder the architecture of chapels came to rhyme visually with that of the engine rooms of valleys pits. 29 Regarded as a ‘moral property’,30 a secular social institution, ideologically divided but functionally largely unified, its performance is impressive.