Search results for ""University of Wales Press""

This study of Bram Stoker focuses on Stoker as a Gothic writer. Identified with Dracula, Stoker is largely responsible for taking the Gothic away from medieval castles and placing it at the centre of modern life. This book examines Stoker's contribution to the modern notion of Gothic.

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Emeritus Professor Robert Maynard Jones (b. 1929), is a Welsh academic who learnt the language, transformed many attitudes within the literary establishment in Wales and remains a highly prolific author. This book outlines his background, his academic career and the influences on his literary development, most notably that of Gustave Guillaume.

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This book examines how Wilkie Collins's interest in medical matters developed in his writing through explorations of his revisions of the late eighteenth century Gothic novel, from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and used the medical more and more to propel his criminal plots. While the archetypal castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist's knife. This study underlines the way in which Collins's Gothic adaptations increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers' fears. It demonstrates how Wilkie Collins's fiction revised Gothic themes and presented them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book's structure is chronological, covering a selection of texts in each chapter; with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins's texts, such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale, and some of his more neglected writings.

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Herbert Williams is one of Wales' most celebrated and distinguished writers. A man of many talents, he is a poet, novelist, short story writer and historian. This book provides a critical survey of his life and writing.

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Analyses the medical category of 'hermaphroditism' in Spain over the period 1850-1960. This title attempts to show how the relationship between the male and female body, biological 'sex', gender and sexuality constantly changed in the light of emerging medical, legal and social influences.

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Kant on Sublimity and Morality provides an argument to the essential moral significance of the Kantian sublime and situates this argument within the history of the relationship between sublimity and morality.

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This book is the first full-length study in English of the work of the highly regarded and influential Argentine poet and anthropologist Nestor Perlongher (1949-92). Perlongher's pioneering work takes on the most dynamic and conflictive themes of modern-day Latin America such as dictatorship, national identity, exile, issues of gender and marginal sexualities, and modern-day esoteric religions; Bollig's study analyses and contextualizes his work as well as offering important tools for reading and understanding challenging and experimental poetry.

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This book centres on the bombing of Getafe, a small town south of Madrid shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Sections of the international press reported that forty or more children had been killed by bombs dropped in the Nationalist cause, a tragedy encapsulated in a poster issued by the Ministry of Propaganda. Accompanied by the words "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next", the poster linked Hitler and Nazi Germany with Franco's ruthless determination to overcome resistance and destroy the Republic. In the eyes of millions outside Spain, the poster helped to explain Madrid's heroic resistance to "International Fascism". The book establishes the central importance of the Getafe incident and goes on to analyse "collateral damage" inflicted by air-forces on both sides during the war, and aims to question what Prof. Stradling considers to be the continuing pro-Republican bias of historical writing on the war. It also discusses reactions in the UK and other European countries. Using the iconic poster as a focus, the book also covers other types of propaganda, including examples in art (Picasso's Guernica), literature, music, photography and film. The book will be unique in that it will be the first to analyse the Getafe incident in detail.

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This book constitutes the first sustained analysis that comprehensively proves that revision is required of the critical commonplace idea in Gothic scholarship that the roots of the Gothic novel should be seen within a late eighteenth century popular anti-Catholicism. Whereas scholarship has always maintained that the Catholic motifs contained in Gothic novels (monks, nuns, abbeys, confessionals) signify anti-Catholic prejudice and anti-Church subversiveness on the part of the author and his/her audience, this study argues that the Gothic was neither anti-Catholic nor anti-Church, and that England was much more sympathetic towards Catholicism during the long eighteenth century - particularly during and immediately after the French Revolution - than has previously been supposed. As well as discussing several new Gothic texts within this context, this study unveils the extent of English appreciation of Catholicism - often represented by an appropriation of Catholic aesthetics - and the French Catholic 'sentimental' origins of many of Gothic's supposedly 'diabolically dissident' themes and motifs. The book tus brings to light many new aspects both of the Gothic genre and of an important era in British history.

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Focuses on religious beliefs and practices of the Christian, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities in multicultural parts of Britain. This book is based on an in depth study of 3418 teenagers in Walsall, and using data from other UK studies, it demonstrates that religion is a decisive factor in understanding communities and individuals.

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This book is about the morality of groups. The author addresses the conflict and tensions that exist between impartiality and partiality within political philosophy, and ordinary thought and practice by relating theoretical arguments to pressing contemporary practical issues such as immigration and emigration policy.

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Bringing together the contributions of the most influential philosophers in the English-speaking world, this book deals with the contemporary debates about identity formation, multi-culturalism, and diversity. It explores the pacifying role of democratic law-making as a possible solution to the issues of diversity, justice and solidarity.

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Johann Nikolas Bohl von Faber (1770-1836) was a Hispanist and Germanist at a time when the balance of ideological dominance was shifting from Enlightenment thought towards the new Romantic aesthetic. This book outlines and evaluates his considerable contribution to the development of European Romanticism.

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Offers research and critical interpretations about British outlaw traditions and the way they have been imagined and presented in both the Middle Ages and the centuries since. This volume focuses on the ways in which rogue-heroes have been used by literature, film, and other areas of popular culture and imagination.

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Contains T H Jones' poetic output. This edition includes early poems and drafts, the verse drama "The Weasel at the Heart" as well as poetry from "The Black Book", Jones' manuscript notebook. It also contains an outline of Jones' career, a bibliography and review of critical materials and a discussion of Jones' poetic techniques.

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Devoted solely to the study of Welsh writing in English, this academic journal provides a forum for critical discussion on Welsh literature and authors. With essays from Victor Golightly on Dylan Thomas, language, and the deaf; Matthew Jarvis on the poetics of place in Ian Davidson's poetry; and Lucy Stevenson on two drafts of an unpublished Dorothy Edwards short story, this journal provides an opportunity to explore the tradition of English-language writing in Wales.

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A brand new Pocket Guide which charts the concise history of sport in Wales since 1800. The book locates the character and structure of sport within the wider social, political and economic context that shaped it.

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Examines and analyses the failure of the established Church in 19th-century Wales to retain the allegiance of the Welsh by appointing English speaking Anglo-Welsh bishops who failed to understand the character and spirituality of the Welsh. As a result, there was a demand for the appointment of Welsh-speakers as bishops for the four Welsh sees.

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A scholarly, theoretical discussion about the resemblance between the history of enlightenment in Europe and the intellectual history of welsh-speaking Wales in the 20th century, comprising of a new insight into the work of such figures as R.T. Jenkins, John Gwilym Jones and Hywel Teifi Edwards.

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A scholarly discussion of the images found in late 19th century/early 20th century lyrical poetry in Wales, at a time of far-reaching social change.

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This book offers an introduction to many aspects of health and society in 20th century Wales, ranging from public health, to personal life-styles and household budgets, birth control and the incidence of deaths from childbirth.

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The Uses of this World examines how early modern theatre texts dramatize the ways in which cultural space is produced. It demonstrates that the theatre engaged fully with the fundamental change in the social and philosophical organization of space which took place in this period. Andrew Hiscock argues that Renaissance drama interrogates models of social organization and spatial boundaries defined by property relations, economic hierarchies, historical custom and kinship ties, and stresses that space is not a neutral, fixed and passive container, but emerges instead as a socially constructed process. Plays considered include Hamlet, The Jew of Malta, Antony and Cleopatra, Tragedie of Mariam (Elizabeth Cary), Volpone and The Alchemist.

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This book addresses the marked decline of religious practice and subsequent eclipse of the social significance of religious institutions in contemporary Wales from a sociological perspective. Throughout, the text is lively, lucid, well paced and is written to be accessible to non-specialists and church leaders as well as sociologists of religion. It breaks new ground in its combination of fieldwork and theory, redressing the tendency within British sociology of religion towards either over-generalized abstraction or under-theorized empirical description. Beginning with a wide-ranging and critical exploration of the main theoretical currents informing the idea of secularization, it then focuses on an account of social and religious change in Wales that incorporates a range of sociological factors relating to class, economy, community, social mobility, demography and cultural identity. Fieldwork interviews provide a compelling account of contemporary religious practice while offering a strong sense of the historical dimension of patterns of social and cultural change within Wales. Apart from its contribution to the sociology of religion, this book makes a significant contribution to the relatively new discipline of congregational studies. It is particularly useful in bringing a more nuanced understanding to notions such as 'evangelical' and questioning the myth of the comparative success of evangelical-charismatic religion in late-modern society. Questions of social class are dealt with directly and usefully as is the impact of social change on difference of outlook between the generations.

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Beyond the Difference is a celebration of the work of Wales's leading literary critic M. Wynn Thomas, with contributions from internationally acclaimed writers and poets, as well as significant critics working in the field. Looking initially at the relationships between the English and Welsh language literatures of Wales, the volume proceeds to explore the interactions of nationhood and gender from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the politics of translation in Wales as compared to Ireland and America, and the intriguing connections between Welsh literature and American, African American, Irish and Jewish literary traditions.

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This shows how Wales's religious history is intertwined with the emergence of a national identity. The author examines religious and social history, events, characters and thought over the four centuries during which Congregationalism has existed and chronicles the history of Wales and the strengthening of its literary tradition.

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A biography of Pennar Davies, the poet, novelist, critic, historian and theologian who played a major role in the literary, cultural and religious life of Wales in the second half of the twentieth century. Black-and-white photographs.

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The main films discussed in detail are Y Chwarelwr, Yr Etifeddiaeth, Noson Lawen, Today We Live, Eastern Valley, Our Country, The Three Weird Sisters, The Citadel, The Proud Valley, How Green was My Valley, The Corn is Green, The Last Days of Dolwyn, Blue Scar and David.

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At a time when the proper role of the state is under constant review, its relationship to the private sphere is a matter of considerable public concern, this text places this debate in historical context.

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For well over a thousand years, scholars exploited the potential of architecture for allegorical representation. Regardless of whether they were describing the characteristics of romantic love, the framework of the medieval education syllabus, the community of the church, the virginal body, or the contemplative vocation, writers turned repeatedly to the trope of the textual building. What was it about architecture that enabled it to fulfil such diverse functions over such a long timespan? Castles of the Mind identifies and traces two primary traditions of symbolic textual architecture - Christian and classicizing - from antiquity until the end of the middle ages. It charts the evolution of the architectural metaphor over time, in relation to social, political and religious contexts, and offers a wealth of information on secular and devotional allegory. Christiania Whitehead suggests new ways of reading and evaluating major medieval texts, such as Chaucer's House of Fame and Gavin Douglas's Palis of Honoure, as well as reassessing the importance of many less well-known works. Castles of the Mind is a major new contribution to our understanding of the symbolic structures and ideological systems underpinning medieval literary and cultural representations.

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When Ben Bowen died, aged twenty-five, in 1903, the Welsh literary establishment predicted his immortality. This book looks at the Bowen phenomenon as a product both of his own view of himself as a great poet and a Wales that fed that assumption. It traces his escape from a miner's life in the Rhondda, his stay in South Africa during the Boer War, his talent for controversy and his growing awareness of his early death. This is the first extended, dispassionate account of the life, work and death of the Treorci-born poet Ben Bowen (1878-1903). Published on the centenary of his death, the work seeks to explain Bowen's short-lived fame and subsequent obscurity. It considers his precocious sense of himself as a poet, the literary, social and religious milieu in which he operated, his desire to use poetry as an escape from humble beginnings, and his awareness from his late teens of his impending death. Through a consideration of the life of this compelling character, Robin Chapman also enhances our understanding of Welsh culture in late-Victorian and early-Edwardian Wales.

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'Consuming Narratives' is a collection of essays dealing with the relevance of the concept and metaphor of appetite for understanding writing, politics, race, nation and gender in the medieval and modern periods.

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The Christian presence in Jerusalem has always been diverse and cosmopolitan, encompassing numerous churches representative of ecclesiastical traditions older than many nation states and ethnic groups. Indeed, the city's various Christian communities are administered by three Patriarchs, five Catholic patriarchal vicars, four archbishops and two Protestant bishops. From the end of the Crusader period onwards, these communities have come under the rule of numerous political entities, from the Ottoman Empire through to the British Mandatory Administration and the modern states of Jordan and Israel. The complex interaction of religion and politics, and the involvement of Christians in politics, has been a constant theme in the religious culture of Jerusalem. The essays collected here provide a comprehensive historical, religious and political survey of the Christian communities of modern Jerusalem. Individual essays deal with topics ranging from church-state relations to women missionaries and various expressions of Eastern and Western Christian presence and, taken as a whole, offer a fascinating overview of Christianity in the Holy Land at the beginning of a new century.

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In this text, the author uses the novels of Robin Llywelyn as a focus for her discussion of the complex relationship between author, reader and society, at the end of the 20th century.

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This volume offers a section of the most important essays published by Emyr Humphreys over a 30-year period. The essays are prefaced by a series of discusssions which explore some of the intellectual concerns and motifs that have recurred throughout Humphreys' work.

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The Information Age offers a critical examination of the challenges a newly-devolved Wales faces in reinventing itself as a confident and competitive 'e-nation'. The development and exploitation of technology has long been at the core of Welsh economic and social life and has assumed even greater significance over the last few decades with the emergence of new information and communication technologies. Neil Selwyn and Stephen Gorard suggest that small countries will lose out if they fail to adopt appropriate strategies for lifelong learning and combat the danger of a 'digital divide'. At the same time, their extensive empirical research offers early indications of the likely shortcomings of relying on technology alone to promote knowledge and social inclusion. Wales faces major structural, economic and socio-cultural challenges. None of these will be overcome by relying solely on 'technical fixes'.

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This text examines the relationship between literature and history in Lazamon's "Brut", a 12th-century verse history of Britain, while demonstrating Lazamon's use of prophecy as a strategy to unite political and religious ideologies.

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Ernest Gellner (1925 - 1995) was one of the major thinkers of the twentieth century. He held major chairs in philosophy, sociology and social anthropology during his distinguished career and contributed to a wide range of political and philosophical debates, most notably in linguistic philosophy, the theory of political nationalism and the theory of history. Gellner was also an outspoken defender of the Enlightenment tradition and social democracy. In Ernest Gellner and Modernity, Michael Lessnoff presents a lucid and coherent exposition of Gellner's thought, both in terms of the specific areas in which he worked and the underlying consistency of his theoretical principles. Lessnoff provides a context within which to evaluate Gellner's contribution to social and political thought and, in keeping with the aims of the series, demonstrates the importance of Gellner's work for contemporary political philosophy.

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Rhys Davies (1901-1978) dedicated his life entirely to writing and is now generally regarded as one of the most prolific and accomplished of Welsh prose-writers in English. In addition to writing over one hundred short stories, his many novels included The Withered Root (1927), The Black Venus (1944) and The Perishable Quality (1957). While he has long been thought of as a master of the short story form, his novels are now considered to be among the finest written by a Welsh writer in English and a critical re-assessment of his career is long overdue. Rhys Davies: Decoding the Hare contains essays on the major aspects of Rhys Davies's life and work, from the literary, social and national contexts within which he wrote to issues of gender, sexuality and race. Published to mark the centenary of Rhys Davies's birth, Decoding the Hare is the first substantial study of his work and will be essential reading for all those interested in twentieth-century Welsh writing in English and in this complex and elusive writer in particular.

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The creation of the National Assembly for Wales and Scottish Parliament has altered the democratic landscape of the UK. In assuming many policy and adminstraitve responsiblities previously held by the central government, the Welsh assembly promises innovation in governance and there are high expectations that devolution will bring about significant changes in Welsh life. "New Governance - New Democracy?" questions whether these expectations are likely to be fulfiled. Drawing on interviews with many of the people who have influenced the devolution experiment, from poltitions to ordinary citizens, this book offers interdisciplinary discussion and analysis of issues ranging from electorial turnout, participation and legitimacy to the involvement of marginalized groups in the process of government. It also examines the developing relationship between the new Welsh legislature and the voluntary sector, the governance of economic development and the regulation and political control of public agencies in Wales.

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The first full examination in English of the career and works of the most popular Welsh author of the twentieth century. Elis laid solid foundations for the contemporary novel in Welsh on which other writers were able to build in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cysgod y Cryman (1953) he demonstrated not only a mastery of his medium but also a gift for story-telling and the ability to create memorable characters. His novels have been adapted and extended as a television series broadcast in the early 90s. In a popular vote organised by the Western Mail his Cysgod y Cryman was voted Welsh Book of the Century. Some of his novels have been published in English, for example Shadow of the Sickle (1998), and Return to Lleifor (1999).

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A lavishly illustrated volume presenting a comprehensive study by a renowned scholar of the rich heritage of Welsh images during the period 1500-1950, noting especially how Wales and Welsh nationhood are portrayed in these images. Over 450 colour images and over 200 black-and-white images. First published in 2000.

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Explores the role played by the Greek and Latin classics in the literature of Wales, from the sixth century to the present day.

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The third volume of a dictionary of the Welsh Language. It presents in alphabetical order the vocabulary of the Welsh language from the remnants of old Welsh, through the abundant literature of the Mediaval and modern periods. To order parts of the Second Edition visit our Librarians page.

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This collection of essays on law and policy in the regulation of countryside development provide a forum for academics, practising lawyers and planning specialists to air their knowledge and opinions on contemporary and historial matters of importance to the countryside.

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In this innovative and lavishly illustrated study John Harvey examines the visual expression of religious and spiritual concepts in Nonconformist Wales. He discusses his subject within a broad cultural context which includes fine art, architecture, preaching, hymnology and such intangible manifestations as visions. The author argues that the Bible had a strong influence on the visual idiolect of Nonconformists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and that it permeated their perception, interpretation and representation of life. This is perhaps most apparent in the imagery of hymns and sermon illustrations and in the vocabulary and phraseology of preachers, but its effect on Welsh visual culture was also profound and far-reaching and affected both the mode and idiom of religious visions as well as the exterior and interior features of the chapel. John Harvey explores his subject with particular reference to the intertwined concepts of religion and mining in the south Wales coalfields. He examines the tradition of biblical identity and fusion as manifest in the visionary experiences of miners and their families since the 1904 revival: the architectural similarities between chapels, collieries and Old Testament places of worship, and sermon illustrations which derived spiritual meanings and lessons from the harsh realities of coal-mining. Latterly, this tradition is evident in the paintings of Nicholas Evans. Arguably, this principle of visualization whereby heavenly realities are clothed in tangible earthly garb, constitutes one of the most distinctive manifestations of Welsh visual culture.

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This volume examines one of the central political questions of the modern world, the uneasy and often violent relationship between the forces of nationalism and democracy. This subject was one of lifelong interest to the late Professor Harry Hearder of University of Wales, Cardiff, to whom the book is dedicated. The focus is on the nation-states of western Europe during the period 1985-1970. Much of the content explores varieties of conflict and compromise between these two 'cultures, ' which had in many aspects a contradictory dynamic, but which nevertheless shared some basic aspirations, and often contrived to coexist, both on the national and international level.

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This text looks at illness and death in Britain as something very dependant upon the whole environment. It adopts the environmental and geographical approach to the study of diseases and death from Medieval to modern times. Maps illustrate the favourable or unfavourable mortality experience of different parts of the country. This scientific study is aimed at the non-expert, to show the way in which the health of the British people is, and has been, influenced by (i)their racial history, blood groups, genes, and (ii)the environment - physical (weather, water, soils), biological (bacteria, viruses, pollen, fungi) and human (housing, food, drugs, pollution, noise, tabacco, alcohol, life-style, social environment). The way in which certain affilictions such as plague, cholera, tuberculosis, smallpox and so on have been, and still are more commonly suffered by the residents of one city, county or region than by others, is comprehensively studied - at various stages throughout British history.

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