Geraint Evans

‘Modernism and magic in the adaptation of Caradog Prichard's Un Nos Ola Leuad/One Full Moon’

ABSTRACT This article discusses Un Nos Ola Leuad/One Full Moon (Emlyn, 1991) as a consciously modernist adaptation of a novel that uses naturalistic modes of representation to defamiliarize the representation of religious experience in early twentieth-century Wales. The article argues that the film successfully adapts the novels critique of fundamentalist religious experience as an unenlightened belief in magic and uses a number of filmic and narrative strategies to locate the film—like the novel on which it is based—within a European modernist tradition that had not been widely adopted in Welsh-language prose or cinema.

William Salesbury and Welsh printing in London before 1557

William Salesbury is one of the most celebrated figures in Welsh history. He was, as R. Brinley Jones has said, “the outstanding example of the Welsh Renaissance scholar” whose “genius for matching the new with the old” allowed him to straddle the eras of manuscript and print and help to create a modern, standard, national language for Wales, as Luther had done for Germany.1 Yet Salesbury’s most significant connection as a scholarly pioneer in the new world of print lies not with early modern Wales, but with London.