Since the earliest days of language, writers and preachers have been locked in a struggle for power and authority. "In the Shadow of the Pulpit" shows how that struggle has been at the heart of Welsh writing for more than two centuries, intimately shaping the English-language literature produced in Wales in that time. It traces the growing literary response to the power of Welsh Nonconformity from the eighteenth century onwards, and it also uncovers a whole new body of nineteenth-century fiction from Wales.