Abstract
If Matthew Arnold’s writings on culture are among his best-known works, his appreciation of Welsh language and literature, while less well known, may be only marginally less influential. Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, following Ernest Renan’s 1854 Essai sur la Poesie des Races Celtiques (both of which followed Lady Charlotte Guest’s publication of The Mabinogion, beginning in 1835) focused well-deserved attention, both
This chapter explores the work that “Time” performs both inside and outside the colonialist imaginary, finding in a Welsh text a compelling argument against the “natural” loss of the past.
The very first thing that strikes one in reading the “Mabinogion” is how evidently the medieval story-teller is pillaging an antiquity of which he does not fully possess the secret; he is like a peasant building his hut on the site of Halicar nass us or Ephesus; he builds, but what he builds is full of materials of which he knows not the history, or knows by a glimmering tradition merely—stones “not of this building,” but of an older architecture, greater, cunninger, more majestical.
—Matthew Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature
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Notes
Mention occurs in John Rhys, “Introduction,” to diplomatics edition of The Red Book of Hergest (Oxford: Clarendon, 1887), ix–x
Proinsias Mac Cana, The Mabinogi (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992), p. 51.
Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Roudedge, 1995), p. 40.
Griffbrd Charles-Edwards, “The Scribes of the Red Book of Hergest,” The. National Library of Wales Journal 21 (1980): 246–56.
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© 2000 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
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Ingham, P.C. (2000). Marking Time: Branwen, Daughter of Llyr and the Colonial Refrain. In: Cohen, J.J. (eds) The Postcolonial Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107342_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230107342_10
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