Ten Pathways into the Digital Bibliography of Welsh Writing in English

This multi-authored paper draws attention to the new, digital bibliography of Welsh writing in English, the English-language literature of Wales. Hosted at the website of the Association for Welsh Writing in English (www.awwe.org), the bibliography is an attempt to list all existing critical writing in the field of Welsh writing in English (as of 2024). Ten authors have been commissioned to investigate its contents via a series of chronological and thematic 'pathways' that reveal the uses, unexpected finds, and occasional shortcomings of this new online resource. Reflecting the depth of the field, some writers approach the bibliography with period-specific parameters in mind (eighteenth-century, nineteenth-century, modernist and contemporary), whole others look at it from a particular theoretical angle (environmental, race, queer), or from the point of view of a particular set of users (secondary school teachers in Wales). Our final author considers the digital bibliography in the context of the history of bibliographies of Welsh writing in English as the field has developed over the last half-century. Although these ten pathways barely scratch the surface of possible uses for the bibliography, and while the bibliography itself is necessarily an incomplete and evolving record, we hope that it becomes an invaluable resource for current and future scholars in this relatively critically neglected area of literary studies.