Search results for ""University of Wales Press""

This is the first book-length treatment of the ‘turncoat’ John Poyer, the man who initiated the Second Civil War through his rebellion in south Wales in 1648. The volume charts Poyer’s rise from a humble glover in Pembroke to become parliament’s most significant supporter in Wales during the First Civil War (1642–6), and argues that he was a more complex and significant individual than most commentators have realised. Poyer’s involvement in the poisonous factional politics of the post-war period (1646–8) is examined, and newly discovered material demonstrates how his career offers fresh insights into the relationship between national and local politics in the 1640s, the use of print and publicity by provincial interest groups, and the importance of local factionalism in understanding the course of the civil war in south Wales. The volume also offers a substantial analysis of Poyer’s posthumous reputation after his execution by firing squad in April 1649.

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This book explores what mentoring is and what are the essential skills required for it to be effective. Based on research, it introduces a new model - Distal mentoring - which embodies best practice and can mitigate negative outcomes. Illustrated with relevant scenarios and mentoring tips, this book is a development tool for active practitioners, and expresses the mentoring process by emphasising its fundamental applications. This is reinforced by case studies and supporting theory, delivering a practical yet digestible medium. After the book's initial exploration of the nature of mentoring, key techniques such as deep listening skills, empathy and powerful questioning are examined along with developing the relationship through empathy, emotional intelligence and rapport building, providing a comprehensive text in its introduction of mentoring as well as its recommendation of best practice.

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A History of Money looks at how money as we know it developed through time. Starting with the barter system, the basic function of exchanging goods evolved into a monetary system based on coins made up of precious metals and, from the 1500s onwards, financial systems were established through which money became intertwined with commerce and trade, to settle by the mid-1800s into a stable system based upon Gold. This book presents its closing argument that, since the collapse of the Gold Standard, the global monetary system has undergone constant crisis and evolution continuing into the present day.

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With over 5000 entries ranging from 50 to over 5000 words, this work covers various aspects of Wales' past, the people, the places, the arts, industries, environment and traditions. It also features the biographies of Welsh men and women who have excelled in natural history, medicine and architecture.

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A collection of Angus Calder's work dealing with war and memory. Beginning with a section devoted to war memorials and the public remembrance of war, the collection then looks at the lived experience of war for the "ordinary" soldier.

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Roland Mathias is one of the most important writers to emerge in Wales since the Second World War. He was one of the founders of Dock Leaves in 1949 and became an outstanding editor of the magazine under its revised title, The Anglo-Welsh Review. He is a distinguished short-story writer, literary critic and, above all, a poet. His poetry is profoundly influenced by the personal challenge of Christian morality and focuses on the intertwined concerns of family, mutability, history and landscape. It is characterized by verbal inventiveness, skilful use of metre and honesty of observation. The Collected Poems of Roland Mathias contains his entire poetic output, from Days Enduring (1942) to A Field at Vallorcines (1996), as well as a number of previously unpublished pieces. The poems are fully annotated and, in addition to a biographical outline and bibliography, the editor's introduction includes an extended discussion of Mathias's poetic development and a review of critical opinions of his poetry. This is the definitive edition of the poetic work of one of the major figures of twentieth-century Welsh writing in English.

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In 2014, Volumes One and Two of the speeches and articles of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales were archived and published by the University of Wales Press. This third volume of the speeches and articles of The Prince of Wales includes a thematic expansion to the section on ‘Climate Change and Sustainability’, accommodating a number of texts that address the interconnected relationship between economic, social and environmental sustainability. As The Prince of Wales marks his seventieth birthday, we note a significant achievement. Over the years, in broader terms, his words and actions have received little publicity, but matters on which The Prince has voiced concern have subsequently risen on the agenda for a great many other thoughtful and well-informed observers. It is hoped that among the merits of this archive is its record of The Prince’s contribution, which will allow a fair and balanced assessment of his singularly remarkable contribution.

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This scholarly edition of The Welsh Life of St David presents the medieval text of the Life of one of the early Christian missionaries of west Wales. More than one recension of the Latin Life written by Rhigyfarch was produced between the end of the eleventh century and the emergence of the abridged version in Welsh written by an unknown author at the start of the fourteenth century. The present annotated text of the Welsh Life is based on that found in the Book of the Anchorite of Llanddewibrefi (c. 1350), and contains a detailed comparison with the earlier Latin version. The comprehensive introduction by D. Simon Evans considers early references to David alongside valid information relating to the Saint in the sixth century, in order clearly to identify the historical David and to outline his significance in an early period of Welsh history. The Welsh Life of St David was first published by the University of Wales Press in 1988.

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Works which have sought to look specifically at the Welsh in Australia have been few in number and characterised by a concentration on prominent individuals and cultural/religious societies, thus excluding many facets of immigrant life. This book provides an analysis of the Welsh immigrant community in the Ballarat/Sebastopol gold mining district of Victoria, Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century and considers all aspects of the Welsh immigrant experience. As its focus, the book has the Welsh migrant group as a whole, in one particular area, during one period of time, for ultimately it was the migrants themselves who were responsible for the strength or weakness of Welsh religious life, the success or failure of Welsh cultural institutions; they who decided whether or not to retain and transmit their national language if, indeed, they spoke it in the first place; they who chose whether or not to marry within their own group, to live amongst their own, to retain the ties of Welshness and pass on the values of the Old Country, or to attempt full and immediate integration; they who were miners or shop owners, abstainers or drunkards, law abiding or criminal. A true picture of Welsh immigrant life can only be obtained by considering the community in its entirety, to view it in the round, as it were. This work attempts to do just that and hopes to make some small contribution to the understanding of what it was to be one amongst the thousands of Welsh people who lived in a particular place at a certain time in a land so far from Wales.

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Russ Williams was raised on Wales's stories, like the one about a mountain that would send you mad or turn you into a gifted poet if you camped out on it, the one about the lost civilisation drowned by the sea and the one about the bottomless lake leading down to the Welsh Otherworld. Stories of witches and giants and heroic kings, dragons and mad doctors, ghostly women, giant beaver monsters, vampire furniture and pirate-fighting monks. As entertaining as it is informative,Where the Folkfollows Russ Williams as he travels in Griff, his creaky red Fiesta, in search of places associated with Wales's legends, folklore and urban myths. In this joyful travelogue, not only does Russ recount some of Wales's most interesting stories; he also explores the origins behind the myths, talking to experts and storytellers to find out how and why they might have come about, and what they tell us about Wales past and present.

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In the second half of the twentieth century, American readers of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories known as Sherlockians worked together to create a world of Sherlock Holmes' that crossed the boundary between reality and fiction. This book applies an innovative literary-geographical lens, informed both by geographical theories of spatiality as a process and literary scholarship readers' active roles in making stories happen, to define the contours of a world in which the ontological boundary ordinarily assumed between the actual and the fictional bend, blur and break. Drawing extensively on the University of Minnesota's Sherlock Holmes Collections, the world's largest archive of Sherlockiana, this book aims to shine light on Sherlockian activities in the mid- to late-twentieth century. This is a relatively understudied but creatively rich period, in which the imaginative foundations of the fandom as we know it were laid. In these years, the world of Sherlock Holmes was col

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The Gothic Chapbook, Bluebook, and Shilling Shocker, 1797-1835 breaks new ground surveying the origins of the gothic chapbook, its publishers and authors, in order to conclusively establish the impact these pamphlets had on the development of the gothic genre. Considered the illegitimate offspring of the gothic novel, the lowly chapbook flooded the marketplace in the late eighteenth century, creating a separate and distinct secondary market for tales of terror. The trade was driven by a handful of individuals who were booksellers and dealers, circulating library proprietors, stationers, and small publishers who produced well over four hundred chapbooks, bluebooks and shilling shockers containing gothic tales from magazines, redactions of popular novels, extractions of entire inset tales, and original tales of terror. This study responds to the urgent and pressing need to contextualise the gothic chapbook in ascertaining a more concise and comprehensive view of the entire gothic genre.

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Un o dadau cenedlaetholdeb modern yw Emrys ap Iwan (18481906), y pregethwr Methodist o Ddyffryn Clwyd. Hon yw'r gyfrol gyntaf arno sy'n dadansoddi'n fanwl seiliau beiblaidd a chrefyddol ei weledigaeth. Mae'n cloriannu ei gefndir a'i fagwraeth, ei addysg yng Ngholeg y Bala ac ar y cyfandir, y dylanwadau Ewropeaidd arno, a'r modd yr aeth ati i ddwyn perswâd ar ei gyfoeswyr i ymwrthod â'r bydolwg Prydeinig a Seisnig. Ceir yn ei homilïau athrawiaeth Gristnogol aeddfed a gwâr, wedi'i mynegi mewn Cymraeg rhywiog ac yn gyfraniad arhosol i feddwl y genedl; mae'r cysyniadau o ras, gobaith a gogoniant yn cael lle blaenllaw. Yn ogystal ? thrafod ei gyd-destun hanesyddol, mae'r gyfrol hefyd yn tanlinellu gwreiddioldeb gwaith Emrys ac yn pwysleisio'i berthnasedd i'r Gymru gyfoes.

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Almost fifty years before Bram Stoker penned Dracula, Dion Boucicault staged The Vampire, a three-act play that thrilled London audiences as well as Queen Victoria. The production boasted innovations of stagecraft and dramatic composition, to say nothing of the mesmerising performance of Boucicault as the titular creature. After The Vampire closed, Boucicault moved to the United States and revised his play, staging a two-act version renamed The Phantom in 1856. The Vampire has languished in relative obscurity, with no published edition nor critical commentary, since the mid-nineteenth century years. Boucicault's original handwritten script provides the basis for this first full edition of his innovative tour de force. Similarly, a manuscript of The Phantom, updated by Boucicault for an 1873 production, offers audiences a new version of this influential play. The Vampire and The Phantom can now take their proper place in the lineage of vampire literature that began with Polidori and con

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This book surveys the economy of Wales from the first Norman intrusions of 1067 to the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536. Key themes include the evolution of the agrarian economy; the foundation and growth of towns; the adoption of a money economy; English colonization and economic exploitation; the collapse of Welsh social structures and rise of economic individualism; the disastrous effect of the Glyndwr rebellion; and, ultimately, the alignment of the Welsh economy to the English economy. Comprising four chapters, a narrative history is presented of the economic history of Wales, 1067-1536, and the final chapter tests the applicability in a Welsh context of the main theoretical frameworks that have been developed to explain long-term economic and social change in medieval Britain and Europe.

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Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

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Little, if anything, is known historically of Arthur, yet for centuries the romances of Arthur and his court dominated the imaginative literature of Europe in many languages. The roots of this vast flowering of the Arthurian legend are to be found in early Welsh tradition, and this volume gives an account of the Arthurian literature produced in Wales, in both Welsh and Latin, during the Middle Ages. The distinguished contributors offer a comprehensive view of recent scholarship relating to Arthurian literature in early Welsh and other Brythonic sources. The volume includes chapters on the 'historical' Arthur, Arthur in early Welsh verse, the legend of Merlin, the tales of Culhwch ac Olwen, Geraint, Owain, Peredur, The Dream of Rhonabwy and Trystan ac Esyllt. Other chapters investigate the evidence for the growth of the Arthurian theme in the Triads and in the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and discuss the Breton connection and the gradual transmission of the legend to the non-Celtic world. The volume, which is unique in offering a comprehensive discussion of the subject, will appeal widely to medievalists, to Welsh and Celtic scholars, and to those non-specialists who have felt the fascination of the figure of Arthur and wish to know more.

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Human civilisation was not just created by humans: we had the help of many creatures, and foremost among these were sheep. From Argentina to Australia and from Mesopotamia to Mongolia, just about every country with hills and meadows has adopted and then developed sheep farming as a way of living. And in Wales in particular, sheep played a central role in shaping landscape and culture. Sheeplands outlines the journeys taken by some of these sheep as they voyaged across the world, both by themselves and with human shepherds, from the earliest human settlements to the present day. Along the way, Alan Marshall paints vivid portraits of the roles sheep have played in the development of the modern world, in times of peace and war, and describes how our sheeplands might continue to influence Wales and the wider world in future years.

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In 1880, Griffith Evans, an army veterinary surgeon in India, made the seminal discovery that blood parasites then universally considered benign were pathogenic. Spurned by peers and colleagues, his conclusions from experiments with diseased horses were acknowledged by Koch and Pasteur, but it took many years before his achievement received general recognition. The son of a farmer near Tywyn, Meirionnydd, Evans was commissioned as a veterinary officer in the Royal Artillery. He was first posted to Canada where, in his spare time, he qualified in medicine. An irrepressible adventurer, he visited North America during the Civil War, meeting Abraham Lincoln and touring the Union front line.Evans's talent for engagement with people and cultures characterised his life in Canada and in India. During a long and productive retirement in north Wales, he immersed himself in local and national affairs. At his centenary in 1935, Evans received the accolades of his profession, community and fami

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No in- or out-of-print book has the same goals, content, wide range, and scholarly approach as the present study. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, previously published books have neglected ancient Graeco-Roman texts that either cause horror or may be said to belong to the horror genre. This may partly be the result of the low esteem in which any text that did not fit neatly into one of the major and traditional literary genres was held by most scholars particularly apparent with regard to texts that dealt with the supernatural or the occult, which were often relegated to specialists in ancient religions, rituals or beliefs. This book reviews the concepts of horror (literary, psychological, and biophysical), examines the current definitions for horror fiction', evaluates the current interest in the darker side of the classical world, and suggests new ways of thinking about horror as a genre.

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The works of Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903–93) are enjoying unprecedented attention from international scholars, writers, journalists, translators and film directors. This book explores the reason for the growing interest, and how it connects with her transgressive representations of motherhood and childhood. By overlapping themes from past scholarship (such as childhood, gender representations, the fantastic and sexuality), new and diverse issues intersect, contradict or revise previous interpretations of Ocampo’s works and her place in Argentine letters. Specifically, the much-overlooked mother/child dyad will offer a unique vantage point for this volume, bringing to the surface disparities concerning age, gender, sexuality, knowledge, agency and voice, often ignored or minimised in theoretical frameworks and popular narratives. This focus on the spaces of motherhood and childhood maps out Ocampo’s consistent refusal to prioritise one space over another, or to legitimise one voice over another, which highlights a radical theorisation of subjectivities in flux.

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In The Foresters, Elizabeth Gunning offers an entertaining romp through the many tropes of Gothic literature, including clandestine marriages; tyrannous fathers; encounters with banditti; mysterious crypts; strange ceremonies conducted at midnight; sublime scenery; a spectre (or two); and inexplicable disembodied voices – to name but a few. Gunning employs all of these devices to create a compelling story combining the wildest elements of fiction with her own personal history and experience within eighteenth-century society, producing both a social document and an entertaining read. Considering multiple complex themes, this novel is not only an entertaining Gothic novel, but also presents some of the most pressing concerns of the day for consideration by the reader. Presented in print for the first time since 1796, the novel is accompanied here by a comprehensive introduction to the text and detailed scholarly notes.

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The Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans was the first large open-air folk museum in Britain. It was (according to himself) created by one man: Iorwerth C. Peate, poet, author, and scholar. This is the first book-length critical study of Peate as scholar and curator, written by one of his successors at St Fagans. Whereas previous commentaries have very largely relied on Peate’s own recollections and views, this book makes extensive use of Peate’s own papers and National Museum archives to inform a far more balanced view of his work, emphasising for the first time the National Museum policy context and its corporate wish to estsablish a national folk museum, and the critical role played by Peate’s boss and bête noir Sir Cyril Fox. This volume also introduces Peate’s relevant Welsh-language writings to anglophone readers.

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This is a study of tumultuous transformations of kinship and intimate relationships in American horror fiction over the last three decades. Twelve contemporary novels (by ten women writers and two whose work has been identified as women’s fiction) are grouped into four main thematic clusters – haunted houses; monsters; vampires; and hauntings – but it is social scripts and concerns linked directly to intimacy and family life that structure the entire volume. By drawing attention to how the most intimate of all social relationships – the family – supports and replicates social hierarchies, exclusions, and struggles for dominance, the book problematises the source of horror. The consideration of horror narratives through the lens of familial intimacies makes it possible to rethink genre boundaries, to question the efficacy of certain genre tropes, and to consider the contribution of such diverse authors as Kathe Koja, Tananarive Due, Gwendolyn Kiste, Elizabeth Engstrom, Sara Gran and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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Thousands of literary, popular, non-fiction and archival texts since the eighteenth century document the human experience of the British industrial canal. This book traces networks of literary canal texts across four centuries to understand our relationships with water, with place, and with the past. In our era of climate crisis, this reading calls for a rethinking of the waterways of literature not simply as an antique transport system, but as a coal-fired energy system with implications for the present. This book demonstrates how waterways literature has always been profoundly interested in the things we dig out of the ground, and the uses to which they are put. The industrial canal never just connected parts of Britain: via its literature we read the ways in which we are in touch with previous centuries and epochs, how canals linked inland Britain to Empire, how they connected forms of labour, and people to water.

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In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Gwrych Castle was familiar to the British public as the setting of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Lesser known is that, at the beginning of the Second World War, this once-grand country house in North Wales became home to around two hundred Jewish refugee children who had been rescued from Europe on the Kindertransport. Under trying conditions, while the families they had been separated from faced the gravest of dangers, these children and their adult guardians established a Hachshara at Gwrych Castle: a training centre intended to prepare them for the dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael), where they hoped one day to be reunited with the families they left behind. In this fascinating debut, historian Andrew Hesketh tells the story of these refugees and the community they built, shining a light on a chapter of Jewish history that deserves to be far more widely known. He recounts moving moments of friendship, respect, tension and humour as the new arrivals and local residents came to know each other, while the shadows of war loomed ever closer, and the Hachshara project found itself facing an uncertain future.

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This book is a pioneering study of Blaxploitation horror films, connecting them with both mainstream horror movies and classic Gothic texts. The author argues that conventional horror films adapt, while Blaxploitation horror films appropriate, the archetypes of Gothic fiction – and rather than exploit, it is argued that they function to satisfy Black audiences. Of the few scholars who have given consideration to Blaxploitation horror films, only occasional chapters have been devoted by them in monographs focused on either Blaxploitation films or horror films. In marked contrast, the present study gives a book-length consideration to Blaxploitation horror films per se, demonstrating how they engage both Gothic fiction and film, and issues of vital significance to American society and culture in the 1970s. In this important and innovative study, chapters explore the sociocultural significance of the vampire, Frankenstein’s monster, Jekyll/Hyde and the werewolf, the zombie and the demon.

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This book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.

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Gothic tourism is a growing phenomenon and a medium through which Gothic fictions and folkloric tales are re-imagined and generated. This book examines the complex relationship between contemporary English Gothic attractions and storytelling, uncovering how works of Gothic fiction can both inspire Gothic tourism and emerge from the spaces of Gothic tourism, contending that Gothic tourist attractions are multi-layered storytelling experiences. Contributing to the study of literature and place, Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism draws together the study of literary Gothic tourism and spatial philosophy, offering interdisciplinary analysis into the interface between Gothic narrative(s) and the spaces in which the tourist navigates. The storytelling practices taking place in Gothic caves, theme parks, ghost tours and rural walks serve to reflect contemporary fears and anxieties. This book situates the act of touring a Gothic site as a process of literary and social discovery.

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Middle Eastern Gothics is the first scholarly volume on Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its nine chapters consider literary expressions of the Gothic in the major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Spanning the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, the book makes a case for the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space encompassing diverse cultures, languages and histories that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic Studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyper-local. Across the MENA region, the Gothic helps express ongoing literary negotiations with modernity, leaving its distinctive mark on representations of globalisation, colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, Middle Eastern literary texts expand the boundaries of the mode on their own terms, refracting broad histories through local and indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic.

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The University of Wales Trinity Saint David was originally founded in 1822 as St David’s College, Lampeter. It is now the oldest higher education collegiate institution in Wales, and in its two hundred years of history has been the recipient of many fascinating and rare manuscripts, early printed books, beautifully illustrated volumes, and rare publications from broadsheets to journals. These were largely received through the generous donations of many benefactors, including the institution’s founder Bishop Thomas Burgess of St Davids, with the collection housed today in the Roderic Bowen Library on the Lampeter campus. This fully illustrated volume contains a selection from the many thousands of works spanning more than seven hundred years, with short essays by scholars whose knowledge and appreciation of the works are unrivalled, revealing the riches of what was once known as ‘the greatest little library in Wales’.

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This volume reflects on two decades of Welsh devolution, and a contributes to debate on its significance and future course. Drawing on previously unpublished interviews undertaken by the late Professor Michael Sullivan with key protagonists in Welsh devolution, and with expert analysis from leading researchers in different disciplines and fields of policy, the book examines what has been described as the emergence through devolution of a 'Welsh stripe' in social democracy. While the volume editors conclude this epithet, coined by Professor Sullivan, is apt, this collection of essays also presents a complex, multi-faceted picture of the drivers of policy, of continuity from the pre-devolution era, as well as change driven by factors within and without Wales. A mixed picture emerges, featuring variously (and in various combinations of) boldness of ambition, distinctive ideological positioning, homegrown priority-setting, the frustrations of the devolution settlement, and adverse (arguably unfair) international comparisons.

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This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic's prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

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Women's Lives presents essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering a different sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings; the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them. The volume includes essays on well-known medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Cartagena, as well as women less-known to scholars of the European Middle Ages, such as Al-K?hina and Liang Hongyu. Each essay is directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff, a scholar of Medieval Women Mystics who helped recover texts written by medieval women.

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The book subjects male characters in six south Wales novels written between 1936 and 2014 to detailed, gendered reading. It argues that the novels critique the form of masculine hegemony propagated by structural patriarchy serving the material demands of industrial capitalism. Each depicts characters confined to a limited repertoire of culturally endorsed behaviourial norms – such as displays of power, decisiveness and self-control – which prohibit the expression and cultivation of the subjective self. Within the social organisation of industrial capitalism, the working-class characters are, in practice, reduced to dispensable functionaries at work while, in theory, they are accorded the status of patriarchally-sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient and ‘feminised’ in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another. As they negotiate, resist or strive to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of such gendered practices, recurring patterns of exclusion, inadequacy and mental instability are made evident in their representation.

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Living Off-grid in Wales examines the new policy context for off-grid rural development by contrasting the policy approach with the activist version of going off-grid. The examples examined in the book feed into much broader debates about the possibility of planning for sustainable development. This book brings clarity to the notion of off-grid by examining two main case studies (supplemented by other ethnographic data) that do off-grid very differently to each other. The policy context that is examined in the book is distinctive to Wales - it is novel to see a planning policy that not only incorporates, but insists on off-grid. The book pivots on this contradiction: if planning (as is thought) is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from these systems? The ethnographic case studies also comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the book's focus on alternative communities brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a new form of radical social assemblage.

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Mae Cyfri’n Cewri yn dathlu bywyd a gwaith mathemategwyr a gysylltir â Chymru. Pan gyfansoddwyd yr anthem genedlaethol ym 1856, roedd Cymru ym merw y Chwyldro Diwydiannol, gyda chymdeithasau gwyddonol yn codi fel madarch ar hyd a lled y wlad. Erbyn diwedd y ganrif, roedd ein dehongliad o’n diwylliant fel un sy’n cynnwys y gwyddorau yn ogystal â’r celfyddydau wedi culhau i gynnwys barddoniaeth, cerddoriaeth a chrefydd ar draul bron i bopeth arall. Yn dilyn poblogrwydd ei gyfrol Mae Pawb yn Cyfrif, mae’r awdur yma’n defnyddio’r un arddull i’n gwahodd i ymfalchïo yn ein mathemategwyr ac i ddangos sut y mae’r rhod wedi troi.

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This book presents the life and work of Professor Evan James Williams, described as one of Wales's most eminent scientists. Williams played a prominent part in the early twentieth-century revolution in physics with the emergence of quantum physics, and was an able experimentalist and brilliant theoretician who made notable contributions in atomic physics and the discovery of a new elementary particle. From humble beginnings in rural Cardiganshire, his stellar career is charted in this book as he climbed the academic ladder at a number of universities, culminating in his appointment as professor of physics at Aberystwyth and election to a fellowship of the Royal Society. During the Second World War, he was instrumental in applying operational research to thwart the threat of German submarines in the Atlantic. His career was cut short, however, by his early death in 1945.

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Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction, and its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large – questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries; erecting and dismantling new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.

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Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

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Videogames are full of horrors – and of horror, a facet of the media that has been largely overlooked by the academic community in terms of lengthy studies in the fast-growing field of videogame scholarship. This book engages with the research of prominent scholars across the humanities to explore the presence, role and function of horror in videogames, and in doing so it demonstrates how videogames enter discussion on horror and offer a unique, radical space that horror is particularly suited to fill. The topics covered include the construction of stories in videogames, the role of the monster and, of course, how death is treated as a learning tool and as a facet of horror.

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The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idees recues surrounding women's ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French, and European, literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flaneur a quintessentially male phenomenon or can there exist a true flaneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading - both individually and collectively - in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women's studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

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This book focuses on Kant's analysis of three issues crucial for contemporary politics. Starting from a new reading of Kant's account of our innate right to freedom, it highlights how a Kantian foundation of human rights, properly understood and modified where necessary, appears more promising than the foundational arguments currently offered by philosophers. It then compares Kant's model for peace with the apparently similar model of democratic peace to show that the two are profoundly different in content and in quality. The book concludes in analysis of Kant's controversial view of history to rescue it from the idea that his belief in progress is at best over-optimistic and at worst dogmatic. Congratulations to Professor Luigi Caranti and his book 'Kant's Political Legacy' which has been given a 'honorable mention' by the North American Kant Society in the competition for the best 2018 book on Kant!! http://northamericankantsociety.onefireplace.org/Announcements/6660588

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