Search results for ""University of Wales Press""

Focuses on Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd, the poet and prince who inspired other poets, including Goronwy Owen, Iolo Morganwg and T Gwynn Jones.

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This book is based on original research in the archive of the Council of Churches in Wales, housed in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, focusing on the work of the Council of Churches for Wales. Formed in 1956, it ceased to exist in 1990 when its successor body, Cytun: Churches Together in Wales came into being. This book provides a history of the modern ecumenical movement in Wales, a movement which has attempted to foster closer collaboration among the churches and denominations, and has promoted the search for closer union between the churches and has enabled the churches to work in partnership in responding to national and international social, economic and cultural list.

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This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930-1992), most famous for their collaborative works "Anti-Oedipus" (1972) and "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980). Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

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Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century cleric, was the first person to compose a detailed and continuous history of Britain from its origins to the domination of the Anglo-Saxons. His writings were enormously popular throughout the western European world, and he is justly credited with bringing 'The Matter of Britain' (including, most notably, the figure of Arthur) to a much wider audience. The vast popularity of this material has persisted to the present day, mainly but not solely in the interest shown in 'King Arthur'. This book illustrates the close ties between Geoffrey's notion of British and Arthurian society and other materials from medieval Wales and Ireland.

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Examines the importance of place in shaping nationalism. This book argues for the need to explore how various people - embedded within particular places and operating across different scales - contribute to its reproduction. It seeks to re-energise both geographical and social constructivist understandings of nationalism.

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A guide to the most important church and chapel buildings in Wales, from the early middle ages onwards. It includes an introduction that provides a clear overview, based on research, of the religious history of Wales and the way that history can be seen in the surviving church buildings throughout the region.

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A collection of critical essays by renowned scholars dealing with various aspects of literature, both poetry and prose, written in English in Wales during the 20th century, including discussions on the work of Christine Evans, R.S. Thomas, Caradoc Evans, and on literary subjects; it also includes a Bibliography of Criticism.

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Charts the public reception and criticism of Iolo Morganwg's writings, the development of his eisteddfod and gorsedd ideas. This volume contains extended selections of his writings, which intend to give the reader the opportunity to study texts of this period.

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History of the Gothic: Gothic Literature 1825-1914 is a detailed and accessible study of Gothic literature in the nineteenth century. It examines how the themes and tropes associated with the early Gothic novel were diffused widely in many different genres in the Victorian period, including the ghost story, the regional novel, children's literature and the realist novel. It looks in particular at how the Gothic attempted to resolve the psychological and theological problems thrown up by the modernization and secularization of British society. The book argues that the fetishized figure of the child came to stand for what many believed was being lost by the headlong rush into a technological and industrial future. The relationship between regionalism and horror is examined, the use of the occult in the Gothic is detailed and the book demonstrates that, far from being a simple rejection or acceptance of secularization, the Gothic attempts to articulate an entirely different way of being modern.

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Provides an overview of and introduction to the Towneley cycle of plays, a 32-play cycle written in c 1500, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and ends with the Last Judgement, and was performed as part of the festival of Corpus Christi in Wakefield. This volume examines the cycle's textual history, and discusses issues of language and style.

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"The South Wales Coalfield Collection" (SWCC) is one of the largest archives of its kind in the UK and of international importance. This unique asset, however, has been under-used as a tool for medical history because, although the Collection has been catalogued, medical records are often 'hidden' and difficult to locate. "Medical Records for the South Wales Coalfield" is designed to make items of medical significance more accessible. Based on a screening of the Collection funded by a Welcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History Award, the volume will be a popular with academic researchers seeking to define viable projects and focus their efforts more effectively; teachers and lecturers wishing to put the SWCC to educational use and members of the general public interested in the medical and healthcare heritage of the Coalfield.

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Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, Los Invisibles focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain. A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project.

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Who was Xespir? Why are Catalan adaptations and performances of Shakespeare currently causing such a stir internationally? What happens to the Shakespeare we think we all know when he is translated into a minority culture? "Shakespeare in Catalan" tells the history of Shakespeare's translation and reception in Catalonia, showing his importance for Catalan cultural regeneration since the nineteenth century and his contribution to the renewed vibrancy of contemporary Catalan culture. In "Shakespeare in Catalan", Buffery explores the cultural history of Shakespeare in Catalan from the nineteenth century right up to the present day. Beginning by tracing the vast range of different responses to his work, in translations, performances and original works inspired by his life and his plays, Buffery addresses the question of how and why Shakespeare was chosen over and above other universal authors and cultural values as an inspiration and a guide to Catalan cultural production.

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Offers a discussion of the developing role of Princess of Wales. The book consists of individual biographies, complementary to one another. Linking this are themes that include the parallels between the lives of the princesses, the developing role and position in society of the Princess of Wales and the importance of Wales within Britain.

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How the Second World War was imagined and portrayed by Welsh authors is the subject matter of this volume, which follows on from Y Rhwyg (1993) and Tir Neb (1996) which discuss the Welsh poetry and prose of the First World War. The discussion extends over sixty years and encompasses the work of those who recorded their experiences at the time and others who abstained from doing so for many years afterwards. This volume also includes fictional and poetic interpretations by later generations. The different responses of various dramatists, such as John Ellis Williams, John Gwilym Jones and Saunders Lewis, are observed here, as well as the poetry of several eminent poets, namely the soldiers Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Elwyn Evans, the chaplain R. Meirion Roberts and objectors such as T. E. Nicholas and Waldo Williams. The volume also considers the work of other writers who did not have first-hand experience of the war, for instance Gwyn Thomas, who was born in 1936, and Alan Llwyd and Sion Eirian who were born after the war ended. The memories of several soldiers are examined, such as Caradog Prichard, Glyn Ifans, Ifan Parri and John Elwyn Jones, along with the experiences of the prisoners of war David E. Roberts and Selyf Roberts. Many images of the war captured by novelists such as Melville Richards, T. M. Bassett, W. Hydwedd Boyer and Martin Davis are also reflected upon in this volume.

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To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth-Century British Literature explores the ways in which anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism made an impact in British twentieth-century literature.

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Postcolonialism Revisited is a ground-breaking book, the first to explore and analyse Anglophone Welsh writing, both literary and otherwise, in the context of contemporary thinking about colonial and post-colonial cultures. Kirsti Bohata considers how far the paradigms of postcolonial theory may be usefully adopted and adapted to provide an illuminating exploration of Welsh writing in English, while simultaneously considering the challenges that such writing might offer to the field of postcolonial theory. In addition to dealing with a range of theorists in the field, including Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Charlotte Williams and Homi Bhabha, the book looks at how Wales has been constructed as a colonized nation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing. Themed chapters include the treatment of place in English- and Welsh-language writing of the 1950s and 1960s; hybridity and assimilation; the position of the Welsh as 'outsiders inside'; the women's movement in Wales during the fin de siecle; and postcolonial understanding of linguistic power struggles. A variety of forgotten writers have been unearthed in this study and are considered alongside more famous names such as R. Thomas, Margiad Evans, Arthur Machen, Christopher Meredith and Rhys Davies. Written in an accessible style, Postcolonialism Revisited will be required reading for those involved in the study of Welsh writing in English.

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A volume of 5 studies which give an account of the national theatre companies that enriched the Welsh cultural scene during the twentieth century, concentrating on how social, political and cultural factors played a part in various campaigns to set up a national theatre company.

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This is the first comprehensive bibliography of Welsh-English literary translation, complementing the online BWLET.net database (live since October 2002) as part of the AHRB-funded project. The earliest translations date from the 17th century and sources for translations vary from anthologies, manuscripts, journals, to audiovisual and internet translations. The information is presented by literary period, with each author appearing alphabetically. Each chapter begins with a short introduction to the literature of the age and to the translations produced, marked with the translator's own literary, cultural, political, gendered and historical concerns. BWLET offers an insight into the energy of Welsh language culture. It maps the cultural exchanges that have shaped it over the centuries and invites new readings of recent cultural relations between the Welsh-speaking Welsh and the majority English language population as well as the Anglophone reading public worldwide.

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A comprehensive history of the founding of the Welsh National Agricultural Society in 1904, its growth and development in the face of early opposition, together with the success of the annual Agricultural Show. An English version, Taking Stock, is available. 93 black-and-white photographs.

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This work is accessible to a whole range of ability at Key Stage 3. It is divided into two sections, c.1485-c.1760 and c.1760-1914. Each section opens with a 'super lesson' giving an overview of major themes and developments within the period, before considering some important turning-points of change.

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An examination of representations of the British working class in 20th-century literature and film. John Kirk reasserts the importance of class as a category of critical analysis through a wide-ranging discussion of the changing nature, status and ideological concerns of working-class writing.

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After a late and shaky start because of the jealousies of local agricultural societies, the Welsh National Agricultural Society founded in 1904 (to be renamed the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society in 1922) was to surmount many problems and difficulties in its first seventy years or so to become by the 1980s one of the three major agricultural societies in the United Kingdom. This remarkable success story is traced by David Howell in fourteen chapters which cover the holding of the show at Aberystwyth from 1904 to 1909, the migratory years between 1910 and 1962 when some 37 'canvass towns' were erected at different centres in north and south Wales in alternative years, and the society's fortunes on the permanent site at Llanelwedd from 1963.

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A biography of the Welsh poet Islwyn, one of the greatest poets of the 15th century. This volume presents a study of his life, as well as looking at the impact the death of his lover, Ann Bowen, had on the writer, which inspired him to write possibly his most famous poem, "Y Storm".

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The first edition of a critical study of Le Voyage du Chevalier Errant (1557), a French allegory translated into Welsh at the end of the 16th century, comprising the complete text in Welsh, a comprehensive preface considering the historical, social and literary context of the text and detailed explanatory notes.

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It has become fashionable in recent years to see Machiavelli as something of a communitarian democrat, a champion of popular participation, social solidarity and the rule of law. This 'sanitized' version contradicts the familiar portrait of Machiavelli as a treacherous foe of political morality, a sycophantic adviser to tyrants, and a forerunner of modern totalitarianism. In this fresh and stimulating analysis of Machiavelli's political thought, Joseph V. Femia steers a middle course between these two extremes, defending Machiavelli's republican credentials without turning a blind eye to his more shocking pronouncements. The Machiavelli who emerges here rejected metaphysics and pioneered a pragmatic approach to politics governed by circumstances rather than by abstract principles. Femia argues that in fact Machiavelli can be seen as the founder of what we now refer to as liberal pluralism - the view, essential to modern democracy, that the primary purpose of politics is to resolve the competing claims of diverse values and interests. Machiavelli Revisited offers a significant reinterpretation of one of the major figures in political theory, and demonstrates the continuing relevance of Machiavelli's thought for the contemporary world.

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A second edition of J Gwyn Griffiths' valuable Welsh translation of Aristoteles' important discussion on the nature of poetry, namely Peri Poiêtikês, together with a comprehensive introduction and detailed notes. First published in 1978.

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Hans-Ulrich Treichel has enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame since the publication of his first novel "Der Verlorene" in 1998. This volume follows the series pattern, aiming to provide an introduction to Hans-Ulrich Treichel and to offer a critical approach to his work.

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This brand new dictionary, containing some 12,000 Welsh and English idiomatic phrases, is sure to be of interest to both Welsh speakers and learners. The phrases included range from those which are true idioms in both languages and cannot be translated literally - such as chwerthin yn ei dwrn: to laugh up her sleeve - to those where only the use of a preposition is different or peculiar - such as amneidio ar rywun: to beckon to somone. Many of the other phrases contain a peculiarity of vocabulary, word order or tense, which means that they cannot be translated word for word. This is a dictionary which will allow you to look up such diverse Welsh phrases as achub y blaen arnyn nhw, blwyddyn gron, corff yr eglwys, dan ei sang, elwa ar ..., Gorau oll!, mewn bri, siarad fel pwll y mor or wedi chwythu ei phlwc; or to see how to translate such English idioms as all and sundry, cat's whiskers, get a fair crack of the whip, in the nick of time, Mum's the word!, on the off chance, stick out like a sore thumb or throw down the gauntlet. An important aim of this dictionary is to help those learning Welsh to make the difficult transition from idiomatic usage in English to idiomatic usage in Welsh, and it will very quickly earn its place as an invaluable tool in that learning process. However, there is little doubt that it will be of great value to many whose first language is Welsh and to those who are studying in universities, colleges and Welsh-medium schools.

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This work considers the extent to which Wales has develped its own educational agenda in a range of areas from primary school to higher education. The limitations of this autonomy in relation to London are also examined.

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A team of distinguished authors highlight and evoke the genius of Welsh football stars and place them in the context of the changing pattern of the game in Britain and internationally.

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A valuable and useful reference book on the subject of the Welsh novel, being a collection of 7 comprehensive articles on the genre, short reviews of 15 texts encompassing the 20th century and 4 interviews with modern novelists, by 15 contributors, together with the editor's perceptive introduction.

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An entertaining portrait of Cardiganshire historian Thomas Richards (1878-1962), a strict librarian and literary critic, lecturer and lively broadcaster on diverse topics. 17 black-and-white photographs.

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A collection of writings from the time of Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuarts, by Catholics who refused to attend Protestant services. They discuss many aspects of Catholic devotions and dogma and give an illuminating insight into their lives and times under hardship and repression.

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Alexander Cordell was born into a military family in Ceylon and spent much of his youth in the Far East. He worked his way up through the ranks fo the British Army to become a major. To many, he must have seemed the quintessential Englishman, and yet his natural sympathies lay increasingly in Wales, where he came to be adored by the reading public. Indeed, his bestselling novels made Wales known throughout the world. His socialist views were also reflected in the subject matter of the more than twenty books that he wrote. Many of his novels are about Wales and include the immensely popular 'Rape of the Fair Country', 'The Hosts of Rebecca' and 'Song of the Earth'. These are novels which relate evocative tales against the backdrop of early industrial Wales and which succeed both in engaging readers emotionally and in increasing their awareness of the past. This is the first biogrpahy of Alexander Cordell. It is written with energy and imagination by Mike Buckingham and Richard Frame, both of whom were close friends of Cordell. The book is based on Cordell's personal papers and on records of conversations with him. It offers a unique opportunity to look into the life of the man behind the books.

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A thorough and valuable study of the role of the woman in Welsh history by means of medieval literary and visual evidence, providing an insight into the attitudes of Welsh society towards female purity and sanctity, and the social, religious, literary and cultural ideas of the age. 9 black-and-white and 11 colour plates.

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King Alfred School in north London was founded in 1898 by a group of Hampstead radicals in an age of educational experiment and innovation. Whereas many educational ventures of that era set up by small groups of idealists soon floundered or quickly lost their crusading zeal, King Alfred School has developed over the last century with its original ideals largely unchanged and its enthusiasm for its distinctive form of education undiminished. This centenary history of a particularly interesting progressive school will appeal to a much wider circle than that of the school's old students. It is a major contribution to the history of progressive education in Britain which in turn is set in the context of a wider educational, social and political history. The study is based on a wide range of sources and is informed by the author's extensive knowledge of the history of education in the twentieth century, a field in which he has published widely.

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This collection of 14 essays provides a fascinating and wide-ranging survey of major writers of fiction from Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa. The book brings together a substantial body of work on the Lusophone novel by scholars working in Great Britain, Portugal and Brazil. It discusses the relationship between autobiography and fiction in the work of the Portuguese writer Camilo, the connection between narration and nation-building in the Angolan novels of Pepetela and popular culture in the novels of Brazilian writer Jorge Amado. The focus of the book is particularly appropriate for a collection of essays on the distinguished Portuguese writer, Alexandre Pinheiro Torres, poet, essayist and above all novelist, who is widely recognized as one of the most important living Portuguese authors.

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Uwe Timm belongs to the generation of writers whose early careers were shaped by personal experience of the student movement in the Federal Republic of the late 1960s. Heiser Sommer, Timm's first novel, deals directly with such individual experience of the protests and with a sense of disillusionment which followed. The author's subsequent novels have, among many other topics, focused on the issues of colonialism and the environment, while his shorter prose works give literary expression to his personal 'Asthetik des Alltags'. Uwe Timm follows the pattern of earlier volumes in the Contemporary German Writers series. It opens with a previously unpublished prose piece by Timm, followed by an interview that the author gave during his visit to the Centre for Contemporary German Literature at University Wales Swansea. Subsequent critical essays focus on the main areas of Timm's work, including the student novels (Heiser Sommer and Kerbels Flucht), anthropological elements in Timm's work, and an assessment of his shorter prose work in the light of the essays on literary technique contained in Erzahlen und kein Ende. The volume concludes with a full bibliography of primary and secondary material.

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This full length study provides a basic account of the rationale and content of victimization surveys; it examines the value of crime/victim surveys and deals with the shortcomings of official statistics gathered by the police. Unlike police figures, victimization surveys are able to study the effects of crime and the social variables which are associated with a high risk of victimization. Crime patterns, repoorting trends, the use and abuse of statistics, attitudes towards the police, fear of crime, and lessons for crime prevention are all examined within this text. Both nationwide and regional surveys are analysed.

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This collection of essays focuses primarily on the narrative voice in French fiction from the mid-19th century to the present, from Balzac through Zola and Proust to the "nouveau roman".

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This collection of research explores the relationship between the Conservative party and British society since 1880 by focusing on the key themes of ideology, national identity, gender and policy. The focus of the text is not so much on the Conservative party as an institution, as on the party's wider significance in British political culture. It seeks to explain the Conservatives extraordinary electoral success in this period and asserts that this success was both problematic and historically contingent. Part one of this study addresses the question of conservative ideology; part two analyzes the role of national identity in Conservative discourse and policy; part three assesses how Conservatives negotiated the gendered nature of popular politics both before and after the arrival of the equal franchise, and part four examines how Conservative understanding of the relationship between state and society were translated into specific aspects of social and economic policy.

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The need to attribute disputed utterance constantly arises, sometimes as a matter of legal urgency (contested 'confessions' or other documents), sometimes as the focus of fierce scholarly debate (was that new story just discovered really by D.H. Lawrence? QSUM finds not), sometimes as a popular diversion (whose words were on the 'Royal Tapes'?) It is in such situations that a scientific method of attribution - one which is objective - becomes desirable. The cumulative sum technique for authorship attribution (Cusum or QSUM, as the analytic procedure is now known) is just such a method. Invented in 1988 by Andre Q. Morton, long recognised as the foremost authority on the subject, QSUM is fully explained with copious illustrations. The technique works cross time and genre, and has already been used to solve several attribution problems. It has obvious uses in legal work, past and present (did Derek Bentley really make that confession? - again, QSUM finds not).

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Women's lives in Wales are changing dramatically. They are becoming increasingly important to the world of paid work, while retaining their roles and responsibilities in the home. The pattern of family life has shifted, to the much vaunted growth of single parents, and the increase of elderly women living alone. Many women are increasingly active in public life, but meet barriers to their success, whether the arena be returning to study as mature students, the church, business, the arts or literature: they are expected to fit into a male world. Women's lives are very diverse, and their changing identity as they manage the balance between private and public lives has been as yet realtively uncharted. This text brings together a collection of interdisciplinary research papers on the changing identity of women in Wales. Research findings are complemented by cameo "voices" - personal accounts by a variety of individual women living and working in Wales. The volume is illustrated with photographs especially commissioned from the photographer Mary Giles.

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This compact English-French glossary, a new concept in dictionaries, is an indispensable guide to the understanding and use of contemporary French lexis and idiom. Conscious of the dryness of many technical and specialized dictionaries, and building on the success of his Newspaper French (1990), the author gives here an essentially practical guide, supplying for each English headword a number of short illustrative examples of a range of contemporary uses with precise contextual translation of the headword or terms formed from the headword. These examples are largely drawn from 'quality' French dailies, news periodicals and specialized texts in the fields of commerce, finance, administration, politics, legal reporting, social affairs and education. While not exhaustive, they represent the most frequently met and useful examples of today's usage, so vital for students, professionals, journalists and business people who need to use specialized registers of contemporary French.

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This English-Welsh dictionary - modelled on the "Harrap Shorter French" dictionary - includes synonyms; illustrative quotations; idioms; accentuation; specialist and technical terms; regional variants; literary and colloquial registers; as well as place-names and personal names.

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The second volume of an excellent edition of a dozen of the published plays of Welsh playwright Saunders Lewis (1893-1985), composed during the period 1957-76, together with four unpublished scripts, with valuable introductions and detailed notes on the background of the plays, and their historical, political and religious references.

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