Welsh Journals

emphasizing 'its character as a cultural construction rather than as a predetermined social process'. Inventing the French Revolution attempts to stand Marxism on its head, or rather it seeks to explain change in France at the end of the eighteenth century as emanating from inside the heads and mouths of those who experienced the drama of the Revolution. Marx, in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, was surely right to argue that 'Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we can not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness'. Marx may (indeed, in my book, he did) go on to over-emphasize the importance of the 'existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production' but as Sieves, Barnave, and Mably realised full well at the time, the political crisis of the late eighteenth century could not possibly be explained without reference to, and a very strong emphasis upon, the development of capitalism, in all its forms. This does not, in any way, invalidate the importance of intellectual history, particularly when it is well-written. It does suggest that even if, for contemporary political reasons, our revisionist colleagues have to banish Marx and Engels to the outer darknesses of the groves of academe, some illuminated spot might be found for Hegel and his insistence upon the dialectic, 'competing discourses' between political, social, and economic history. GWYNNE LEWIS Warwick THE EISTEDDFOD. By Hywel Teifi Edwards. University of Wales Press on behalf of the Welsh Arts Council, Cardiff, 1990. Pp. 85. £ 3.50. Emyr Humphreys in one of his early novels in the series 'Land of the Living' has a cameo portrait of W. J. Gruffydd stalking the Eisteddfod Field at Pwllheli in 1925, rosette ablaze with pride, his eyes eyeing the female attractions. I do not know whether Mr. Humphreys proposes to visit the Eisteddfod again in one of the revamped later (and contemporary) novels of his series, but if he does he will find it difficult to describe that Eisteddfod without portraying Hywel Teifi Edwards (like Gruffydd, somewhat larger than life) lecturing in the Literary Pavilion on Hwfa Mon or the Social Science Section on some other aspect of the Festival's history-lecturing, it should be said, with hwyl and humour that disguises his critical scholarship as entertainment and his shrewdness as sarcasm. Swansea's Professor of Welsh is as heroic and substantial a figure in 1991 as Hwfa Mon was in 1891; but whereas Hwfa's talent was for pomp and ceremony, Hywel's talent is for home truth and history. Professor Edwards has become such an important figure on the Eisteddfod Field and in Welsh scholarship primarily because he has made the Eisteddfod, and especially the Victorian Eisteddfod, such a fruitful field of study. In his memorable Gwyl Gwalia (1980), in his lectures and monograph on Ceiriog, and latterly in his book on the