Download or read book In the Shadow of the Pulpit written by M. Wynn Thomas and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer versus preacher: this book shows how this struggle has lain at the heart of Welsh writing and culture for the past two hundred years, intimately shaping the English language literature produced by Wales. Starting with a simple explanation of the history and character of Welsh Nonconformity, it traces the growing textual response to Nonconformity’s hegemonic cultural power from the eighteenth century onwards, culminating in twentieth-century writers’ attempts to undermine it by wresting words from the control of the pulpit. It also uncovers a whole new body of nineteenth-century fiction from Wales, and re-defines Dylan Thomas’s debt to his Nonconformist ancestors.