Search results for ""university of wales press""

This volume provides readers with a comprehensive literary and historical basis for understanding servant characters and servant narratives in the early Gothic mode. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, servants were ‘othered’ figures whose voices had the potential to undermine socio-political and personal identity. This study recasts servant characters within the early Gothic mode as ‘narrators’ who verbally or non-verbally perform dialogue, moral insights and folkloric or gossip-based stories. Examining the development of servant narrative within the early Gothic mode, Servants and the Gothic outlines the socio-historical and literary influences which defined the servant voice during the eighteenth century, as well as identifying and expanding upon the ways in which servant narratives contributed to each author’s unique goals. It redefines servant narratives as a Gothic ‘performance’, a self-conscious self-examination of the ways in which a Gothic narrative impacts literary, social and personal identity.

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This is the first comprehensive authoritative survey of Arthurian literature and traditions in the Celtic languages of Welsh, Cornish, Breton, Irish and Scottish Gaelic. With contributions by leading and emerging specialists in the field, the volume traces the development of the legends that grew up around Arthur and have been constantly reworked and adapted from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. It shows how the figure of Arthur evolved from the leader of a warband in early medieval north Britain to a king whose court becomes the starting-point for knightly adventures, and how characters and tales are reimagined, reshaped and reinterpreted according to local circumstances, traditions and preoccupations at different periods. From the celebrated early Welsh poetry and prose tales to less familiar modern Breton and Cornish fiction, from medieval Irish adaptations of the legend to the Gaelic ballads of Scotland, Arthur in the Celtic Languages provides an indispensable, up-to-date guide of a vast and complex body of Arthurian material, and to recent research and criticism.

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This study is the first thorough analysis of the extent of the opposition to the Great War in Wales, and is the most extensive study of the anti-war movement in any part of Britain. It is, therefore, a significant contribution to our understanding of people’s responses to the conflict, and the difficulty of mobilising the population for total war. The anti-war movement in Wales and beyond developed quickly from the initial shock of the declaration of war, to the civil disobedience of anti-war activists and the industrial discontent excited by the Russian Revolution and experienced in areas such as the south Wales coalfield in 1917. The differing responses to the war within Wales are explored in this book, which charts how the pacifist tradition of nineteenth-century Welsh Nonconformity was quickly overturned. The two main elements of the anti-war movement are analysed in depth: the pacifist religious opposition, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the Nonconformist dissidents who were particularly influential in north and west Wales; and the political opposition concentrated in the Independent Labour Party and among the radical left within the South Wales Miners’ Federation.

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This book is about the weird and wonderful lesser-known ‘spirit’ entities of ancient Egypt –daemons, the mysterious and often fantastical creatures of the Egyptian ‘Otherworld’ – and the closely related spirits of the dead, which together conjure the excitement of all things otherworldly. Daemons and spirits are generally defined in Egyptology as creatures not of this world, which do not have their own cult centre, and both groups are frequently listed together in protective spells. This volume explores the general nature of daemons and spirits in ancient Egypt and discusses a selection in more detail: it uses artefacts from Wales’s important collection of Egyptian objects at the Egypt Centre at Swansea University, in which are to be found a dwarf daemon with sticking out tongue; several guardian daemons of the Otherworld; creatures who are part snake and part feline; spirits of deceased humans; and a Greek satyr Silenus, companion to the wine god Dionysus.

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This is a study of royal government in the southern counties of the principality of Wales between the beginning of Edward I’s conquest in 1277 and Henry VIII’s ‘act of Union’. This reprinted edition of the book, first published in 1972, includes a new introduction to incorporate recent writings on the subject. Part I discusses the administrative framework of Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire and the way in which it evolved in response to the political needs and reactions of governors and governed. Part II is a comprehensive biographical calendar of the officers of English kings and princes in south Wales, based on a wide range of published and unpublished sources – their careers, experience and wealth. The book has been of great value to political and administrative historians, not only of Wales but of England too, and it also retains a value for students of Welsh society, and for literary and personal-name scholars. No comparable comprehensive study of the involvement of men (rarely of women) in public service in late-medieval Wales (or indeed England) exists for this level of society and government.

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This wide-ranging book contains twelve chapters by scholars who explore aspects of the fascinating field of Celtic mythology - from myth and the medieval to comparative mythology, and the new cosmological approach. Examples of the innovative research represented here lead the reader into an exploration of the possible use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in Celtic Ireland, to mental mapping in the interpretation of the Irish legend Tain Bo Cuailgne, and to the integration of established perspectives with broader findings now emerging at the Indo-European level and its potential to open up the whole field of mythology in a new way.

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Dyma gasgliad o ysgrifau sy’n archwilio rhai o’r dolennau cyswllt cymhleth a chyfoethog rhwng diwylliannau llên Cymraeg a llên Saesneg Cymru dros ganrif a mwy. Mae’r testunau a drafodir yn amrywio o bynciau cyffredinol (tarddiad y syniad fod y Cymry yn genedl gapelog; delweddau Cymru o Ewrop; ei hagwedd at y Taleithiau) i ddadansoddiadau manwl o weithiau unigol (Gwaed yr Uchelwyr; Ymadawiad Arthur); ac astudiaeth o awduron sydd wedi eu hanwybyddu i raddau helaeth (Pennar Davies; Alun Llywelyn-Williams).

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This is the first full-length study of the poet, novelist and translator Christopher Meredith, best-known for his novel Shifts (1988), the classic account of post-industrialisation in Wales. It draws on new material from interviews with Meredith to locate his writing in the context of his native south-east Wales. This locale, with its distinctive combination of rural and industrial and its fractured history, informs a concern with place, language and identity that runs through Meredith's work. Using chapters which pair his poetry and fiction in order to listen to the echoes between them, this study traces the development of his writing and illuminates the shared themes and concerns that connect his texts. Positioning his work in relation to wider critical discourses on the industrial novel and historical fiction, the book argues for Meredith's international significance as a major writer concerned with place and national identity.

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This study considers Welsh Jewry as a geographical whole and is the first to draw extensively on oral history sources, giving a voice back to the history of Welsh Jewry, which has long been a formal history of synagogue functionaries and institutions. The author considers the impact of the Second World War on Wales’s Jewish population, as well as the importance of the Welsh context in shaping the Welsh-Jewish experience. The study offers a detailed examination of the numerical decline of Wales’s Jewish communities throughout the twentieth century, and is also the first to consider the situation of Wales’s Jewish communities in the early twenty-first, arguing that these communities may be significantly fewer in number and smaller than in the past but they are ever evolving.

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Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

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This study of dreaming, death and shared consciousness develops a context that is humanistic, comparative and evidence-based in its engagement with the work of cultural anthropology, ethnomusicology and the study of the imagination. It also reaches into current research on consciousness at the interface of neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, musicology, computer studies, psychology/parapsychology, literature and cognitive studies, in the process of drawing its content from a range of original writing from diverse disciplinary and cultural backgrounds.

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Wales may be small, but culturally it is richly varied. The aim in this collection of essays on a number of English-language authors from Wales is to offer a sample of the country’s internal diversity. To that end, the author’s examined range – from the exotic Lynette Roberts (Argentinean by birth, but of Welsh descent) and the English-born Peggy Ann Whistler who opted for new, Welsh identity as ‘Margiad Evans’, to Nigel Heseltine, whose bizarre stories of the antics of the decaying squierarchy of the Welsh border country remain largely unknown, and the Utah-based poet Leslie Norris, who brings out the bicultural character of Wales in his Welsh-English translations. The result is a portrait of Wales as a ‘micro-cosmopolitan country’, and the volume is prefaced with an autobiographical essay by one of the leading specialists in the field, authoritatively tracing the steady growth over recent decades of serious, informed and sustained study of what is a major achievement of Welsh culture.

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This book traces the development of community development/organization as it evolved separately in Britain and the United States, and how the social and political situations in each country determined the various shapes and directions it took. In presenting a comprehensive history of the subject, Community Organization and Development draws on local and international factors that have helped to shape its application and fortunes across varied settings. Recent economic and social pressures, the changing demographics of developed economies, and the rise of social and cultural diversity all contribute to the need for a comprehensive model that can be deployed to effect the necessary social changes required for sustained change with stability. The history of this intervention technique throws up many examples from which insight can be gained for the present time, and Wales is used as an example of how national policy and local development could be combined for maximum effect. Community development should become reliable and quantifiable, and the comprehensive model developed here demonstrates how and when it should be deployed.

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While twentieth-century Welsh Nonconformity and the Anglican Church in Wales have both received historical attention, there is no similar treatment of the Roman Catholic Church. This study redresses this imbalance, and is based largely on previously unseen evidence. The book begins by charting and accounting for the remarkable growth of the Roman Catholic Church in Wales between the formation of its Province of Wales in 1916 and the commencement of the Second Vatican Council in 1962. This growth was at a time when Nonconformity, hitherto predominant in Welsh religion, began its spectacular decline. The book goes on to examine critically the reaction to the Catholic expansion, both from within and outside the Church. This new paperback edition of the book includes a fully updated bibliography and a new chapter exploring progress in the field since the book’s original publication.

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Written as an act of protest in a Welsh-speaking community in north-west Wales, Why Wales Never Was combines a devastating analysis of the historical failure of Welsh nationalism with an apocalyptic vision of a non-Welsh future. It is the ‘progressive’ nature of Welsh politics and the ‘empire of the civic’, which rejects both language and culture, that prevents the colonised from rising up against his colonial master. Wales will always be a subjugated nation until modes of thought, dominant since the nineteenth century, are overturned. Originally a comment on Welsh acquiescence to Britishness at the time of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, the book’s emphasis on the importance of European culture is a parable for Brexit times. Both deeply rooted in Welsh culture and European in scope, Why Wales Never Was brings together history, philosophy and politics in a way never tried before in Wales. First published in Welsh in 2015, Why Wales Never Was affirms the author’s reputation as one of the most radical writers in Wales today.

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This stimulating and comprehensive study of the period between the establishment of the new Tudor administrative framework and the outbreak of the Civil War offers a well-grounded and fascinating survey of the attitudes, opinions and responses of the gentry to the political and religious circumstances in which they lived. The book discusses the ways in which the gentry, thrust into positions of prominence in the context of the Tudor state, interpreted that status and authority they enjoyed and the power entrusted to them. It surveys the influence which the concept of the ‘island empire’ had on attitudes to public roles and duties, and traces the extent to which loyalties to the Crown and to kindred groupings affected the image projected by the gentry in their political, religious and domestic roles. The book is given an added dimension by a consideration of gentry attitudes in Wales in the context of the humanist ideas current in Europe. This is a mature study based on a wide range of primary and secondary sources, material from which has been successfully integrated into the text. It offers an insight into the perceptions and assumptions of an élite culture at a crucial time in that culture’s development.

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Un o gyfrolau mwyaf dadleuol yr ugeinfed ganrif yw Williams Pantycelyn gan Saunders Lewis, ac ymhlith yr astudiaethau beirniadol mwyaf cynhyrfus i ymddangos erioed yn y Gymraeg. Cynigiodd y gyfrol ffordd newydd i ddehongli athrylith yr emynydd o Bantycelyn, a thrwy hynny sefydlu enw Saunders Lewis fel beirniad mwyaf beiddgar a chreadigol ei genhedlaeth. Er mwyn nodi trichanmlwyddiant geni'r emynydd yn 2017, mae Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru yn ailgyhoeddi'r gyfrol; mewn rhagymadrodd helaeth i'r cyhoeddiad newydd, mae D. Densil Morgan yn dadansoddi cynnwys y gwaith, ei dafoli'n feirniadol ac yn olrhain ei ddylanwad ar y meddwl Cymreig o'i gyhoeddi yn 1927 hyd heddiw. Mae'n ddathliad deublyg o greadigrwydd Saunders Lewis ac o gyfraniad aruthrol y Per Ganiedydd i waddol y diwylliant cenedlaethol.

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Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

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As we progress into the twenty-first century, Wales is acquiring a new identity and greater legislative autonomy. The National Assembly and the Welsh Government have power to create laws specifically for Wales. In parallel, the judicial system in Wales is acquiring greater autonomy in its ability to hold the Welsh public bodies to account. This book examines the principles involved in challenging the acts and omissions of Welsh authorities through the Administrative Court in Wales. It also examines the legal provisions behind the Administrative Court, the principles of administrative law, and the procedures involved in conducting a judicial review, as well as other Administrative Court cases. Despite extensive literature on public and administrative law, none are written solely from a Welsh perspective: this book examines the ability of the Welsh people to challenge the acts and omissions of Welsh authorities through the Administrative Court in Wales.

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Where oceans, land and atmosphere meet, three dynamic forces contribute to the physical and ecological evolution of coastlines. Coasts are responsive systems, dynamic with identifiable inputs and outputs of energy and material. In chapters illustrated and furnished with topical case studies from around the world, this book establishes the importance of coasts within a systems framework - waves, tides, rivers and sea-level change all play critical roles in the evolution of our coasts.

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This research monograph is the first authoritative work on the office of the Welsh Language Commissioner and the associated Welsh language regulatory and statutory regime. In setting the Commissioner in context – in Wales, the UK and internationally – the work draws upon a rich variety of source material arising from fieldwork conducted in a number of jurisdictions. The research data includes, for example, an extensive series of documents obtained under a number of Freedom of Information applications, in-depth interviews with key actors from pertinent legislatures, governments, regulatory offices, interest groups and civic society. The linguistic coverage of source material includes English and Welsh, as well as, where relevant, Irish, German, Catalan, Spanish, French and Basque, in a publication which is multi-disciplinary in approach, engaging with the scholarly and professional literature in language policy and planning, socio-legal studies and the politics of language.

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Now available in paperback, this fully illustrated volume traces the emergence of Welsh traditional music through the ages and is complemented throughout with more than 200 musical examples. Phyllis Kinney's Welsh Traditional Music covers the traditional music of Wales from its beginnings through to the present day, providing musical analysis and placing its material firmly into a social and historical context. Among the many different forms of Welsh traditional music discussed are seasonal music (including wassail songs, Christmas and May carols and Plygain carols), folk drama, ballad-singing, the relevance of the eisteddfod and the musical journals of the nineteenth century. Additionally, the book includes a history of song collecting from the eighteenth century to the establishment and ongoing activities of the Welsh Folk-Song Society in the twentieth; both the instrumental and the vocal traditions are examined, as well as the uniquely Welsh tradition of ‘cerdd dant’. This is a work of pioneering scholarship that accounts for Welsh traditional music within the context of a greater Welsh musical tradition.

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Shortlisted for the Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing 2016 The wave of unrest which took place in 1840s Wales, known as ‘Rebeccaism’ or ‘the Rebecca riots’, stands out as a success story within the generally gloomy annals of popular struggle and defeat. The story is remembered in vivid and compelling images: attacks on tollgates and other symbols of perceived injustice by farmers and workers, outlandishly dressed in bonnets and petticoats and led by the iconic anonymous figure of Rebecca herself. The events form a core part of historical study and remembrance in Wales, and frequently appear in broader work on British radicalism and Victorian protest movements. This book draws on cultural history, gender studies and symbolic anthropology to present fresh and alternative arguments on the meaning of Rebeccaite costume and ritual; the significance of the feminine in protest; the links between protest and popular culture; the use of Rebecca’s image in Victorian press and political discourse; and the ways in which the events and the image of Rebecca herself were integrated into politics, culture and popular memory in Wales and beyond. All these aspects repay greater consideration than they have yet been accorded, and highlight the relevance of Rebeccaism to British and European popular protest – up to and including the present day.

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This enthralling biography tells the complete story of one of Tudor England’s most enigmatic figures. A Welshman born in Tenby, south Wales, c.1512, Robert Recorde was educated at both Oxford and Cambridge. This book, a detailed biography of this Tudor scholar, reviews the many facets of his astonishingly wide-ranging career and ultimately tragic life. It presents a richly detailed and fully rounded picture of Recorde the man, the university academic and theologian, the physician, the mathematician and astronomer, the antiquarian, and the writer of hugely successful textbooks. Crown appointments brought Recorde into conflict with the scheming Earl of Pembroke, and eventually set him at odds with Queen Mary I. As an intellectual out of his depth in political intrigue, beset by religious turmoil, Recorde eventually succumbed to the dangers that closed inexorably around him.

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In a world increasingly dominated by visual sensation, our understanding of the role and influence of comics and cartoon humour in popular culture has become essential. This book offers a critical and cognitive focus that captures the changing fortunes of Catalan humour production against the shifting political landscape in the period 1898–1982. It considers how Catalan satire has been influenced by periods of relative calm as well as censorship, violence, war and dictatorship, and among its key features is its presentation of a continued cartooning tradition that was not ended by the installation of the Franco dictatorship, but which rather continued in a number of adapted forms, playing its own role in the evolution of the period. Thus, as well as introducing the most representative cartoonists and publications, the Catalan example is used to explore broader aspects of this complex communication form, opening new avenues for cultural, historical and socio-political research.

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Making Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess: Textuality and Reception is the first comprehensive book-length study of Chaucer’s earliest major narrative poem and its reception. It provides a rigorous and critically balanced assimilation of the Book of the Duchess, the story of its reception and dissemination, and the major trends in its interpretive history into the fabric of twenty-first century Chaucer studies. Focusing on the construction and value of the Book of the Duchess as a book, this study explores Chaucer’s concern with acts of writing and the textual mediation of experience. At the same time, it contextualises Chaucer’s poem within his era’s broader concerns with authority, reading practices, and the vernacular. By yoking issues of creative and scholarly reception with those of book production and materiality, Jamie C. Fumo’s study innovatively highlights acts of collaboration stemming from the poem’s status as a textual, imaginative act.

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Cultivating the Heart examines the nurturance of feeling – especially the intertwined affective stirrings of compassion, love, and sorrow – in a range of religious texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These texts encourage, stimulate, define and attempt to express the ‘cultivation of hearts’, an image inspired by Part VII of Ancrene Wisse, whereby readers and audiences of the texts nurture a range of sophisticated ‘affective literacies’. In addition to extensive analysis of English, Latin and Anglo-Norman texts, this book makes substantial reference to the affective strategies of wall paintings in parish churches, demonstrating how the affective strategies of wall paintings cannot be perceived as inferior to or irreconcilable with the affective import of textual media.

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This book fills the Iberian linguistic and geographical gap in Arthurian studies, replacing the now-outdated work by William J. Entwistle (1925). It covers Arthurian material in all the major Peninsular Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician); it follows the spread of Arthurian material overseas with the seaborne expansion of Spain and Portugal from Iberia into America and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; and, as well as examining the specifically Arthurian texts themselves, it traces the continued influence of the medieval Arthurian material and its impact on the society, literature and culture of the Golden Age and beyond, including its presence in Don Quixote, the influential Spanish Arthurian-inspired romance Amadís de Gaula, and in Spanish ballads. Such was its influence that we find an indigenous American woman called ‘Iseo’ (Iseult); and an Arthurian story appeared in an indigenous language of the Philippines, Tagalog, as late as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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The first of two volumes on the social history of Wales in the period 1870–1948, People, Places and Passions concentrates on the social events and changes which created and forged Wales into the mid-twentieth century. This volume considers a range of social changes little considered elsewhere by studies in Welsh history, accounting for the role played by the people of Wales in times of war and the age of the British Empire, and in technological change and innovation, as they travelled the developing capitalist and consumerist world in search of fame and fortune.

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Throughout the history of Thomas’s critical reception, psychoanalytic interpretations have been applied that have privileged the psychosexual over the psycho-linguistic elements of his work. The wealth of sexual and pseudo-sexual imagery has acquired a negative charge, and has been used to evidence claims that Thomas was the epiphon of his own disturbed psyche, thus reducing the poetry to the expression of the poet’s schizoid neuroses. Avoiding the biography-based approaches that have dominated hitherto, Liberating Dylan Thomas rescues his early poetry from the position of servitude to the discursive mastery of psychoanalysis. Placing the poetry and psychoanalysis together in a mutually illuminating dialogue, this book clearly demonstrates the ways in which the vital connection between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and Thomas’s early poetry can be articulated without reductive simplification.

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The gothic, particularly in its contemporary incarnations, is often constructed around largely disembodied concepts such as spectrality or the haunted. Body Gothic offers a counter-narrative that reinstates the importance of viscerality to the gothic mode. It argues that contemporary discourses surrounding our bodies are crucial to our understanding of the social messages in fictional mutilation and of the pleasures we may derive from it. This book considers a number of literary and cinematic movements that have, over the past three decades, purposely turned the body into a meaningful gothic topos. Each chapter in Body Gothic is dedicated to a different corporeal subgenre: splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror are all covered in its pages. Close readings of key texts by Clive Barker, Richard Laymon, Joseph D'Lacey, Matthew Stokoe, Tony White or Stanley Manly are provided alongside in-depth analyses of landmark films such as Re-Animator (1985), The Fly (1986), Saw (2004), Hostel (2005), The Human Centipede (2011) and American Mary (2012). Contents Introduction: From Gothic Bodies to Body Gothic Chapter 1 – Splatterpunk Chapter 2 – Body Horror Chapter 3 – The New Avant-Pulp Chapter 4 – The Slaughterhouse Novel Chapter 5 – Torture Porn Chapter 6 – Surgical Horror Conclusion: The Gothic and the Body Notes Works Cited Filmography

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This edited volume discusses the contribution of Thomas Charles of Bala (1755-1814) to the life of Wales on the occasion of the bicentenary of his death. Comprising the latest research by twelve experts in their fields, it covers his work in education, religion, literacy, scholarship, lexicography and culture. Thomas Charles was one of the architects of modern Wales and this book, the most detailed work on the subject to be published for over a century, will be of great interest to cultural historians and literary critics alike.

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Much of the social and industrial history written during the last quarter of the twentieth century presented Welsh working-class culture in terms of a thirst for knowledge that was secular, economic and political. The emphasis was squarely placed on the influence of the union lodge and the workingmen's institute, and priority was given to the importance of sport and the public house in the life of the working class. Relatively little attention was given to religion and its continuing influence on industrial communities, despite the fact that the 1904 - 5 revival brought many thousands into contact with the chapel. Inspired in part by the challenge of socialist and labour agitation and in part by theological considerations, Nonconformists moved away from specifically political involvement and developed their own responses to the social questions of the day. This new edition will appeal to a fresh generation of scholars and readers interested in Wales's Nonconformist history, presenting an exploration of Welsh social thinking, politics and religion.

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This experimental volume of literary criticism offers various interpretations of the work of the poet Menna Elfyn, and gives an outline of our relationship with literature and our reading habits. It is an attempt to provide a fresh interpretation of the work by experimenting for the first time in Welsh with the epistolary method of criticism, through a series of fictional letters. This is also the first extended study of Menna Elfyn's poetry: addressed to the poet's work in particular, but also looking at contemporary issues such as interpretation, performance and the marketing of literature in contemporary Wales. Academic practices are vigorously challenged by walking the line between 'fact' and 'fiction' to create a multi-vocal and readable criticism reflecting the complex and multifaceted nature of the reading process.

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A new edition of a Welsh interlude which shows strong support for the French Revolution, and which has not received any critical attention since the end of the eighteenth century.

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From 1875 to the present day, the Cardiff and Bristol Channel Incorporated Shipowners' Association has been the representative body for shipowners in Cardiff and other Bristol Channel ports. This study looks at some of the most representative periods in its history: the reaction of the Association to the proposal to build new docks in Barry in the 1880s, the Seaman's Strike in 1911, and the schism which split the Association in 1912-14. David Jenkins also reveals that a barrage across the estuary of the rivers Taff and Ely was first proposed as early as 1920. Nothing came of that proposal, but in 1929 a similar scheme was once more under consideration, comprising a dam with two locks across the tidal channel, between Penarth Head and Queen Alexandra lock.

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One of three romances originating in the mists of Arthurian legend.

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Two distinguished historians of twentieth-century Britain, especially Wales, marshal seventeen fellow historians to describe the momentous twentieth century in the history of south-east Wales. The book is the fifth and last volume in a magisterial survey of Gwent/Monmouthshire from prehistoric times to the present day. Two World Wars and deep depression tested the resilience of the county's people, while the decline of mining and heavy industry shifted the balance of the county's economy. Other chapters analyse the life and leisure of ordinary people, their cultural, intellectual and sporting interests, their religion which formerly bulked so large in their lives, and the changes in the landscape of town and country.

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This revealing and controversial book weighs and reflects on the historical truth of the accusations of sympathy with Fascism against Plaid Cymru and its leaders.

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A study of the colourful history and controversial films of the Welsh Film Board (1971-86), a body established solely for the purposes of Welsh-language film production.

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Monastic Wales - new approaches is an interdisciplinary collection of essays written by some of the leading scholars working on aspects of medieval Welsh history. The chapters in this volume consider the history, archaeology, architecture and wider cultural, social, political and economic context of the religious houses of Wales between the Norman conquest in the eleventh century, and the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth.

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This book examines welsh perspectives on the search for sustainable law and policy solutions to modern environmental threats.

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Royce Mahawatte critically compares the frightening, startling and melodramatic moments in George Eliot's fiction with excerpts from Gothic and sensation novels and in doing so argues that suspenseful plotting, and Gothic figures and tropes, play a role within Eliot's ambitions for the Victorian novel.

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The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1979, globally the most popular of human rights treaties, requires States Parties to take action to secure the rights of minors. Through contributions by some of those most closely involved, this book tells the story of the UNCRC in Wales. It explains the provisions and practical impact of the ground-breaking Rights of Children and Young Persons (Wales) Measure 2011, the first law within the UK designed to give further effect to the UNCRC. The collection is a major contribution to understanding of the challenges of UNCRC implementation and shows why the Welsh model of incorporation is attracting worldwide interest.

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This book draws on original research to consider the connections between childcare, family lives and social policy. The research, located in Wales in the period following devolution, concerns the capacity of policy to enhance family well-being. In interviews with mothers and fathers of young children, their day-to-day childcare arrangements are explored through the themes of gender, social networks, material circumstances and neighbourhood resources. This material provides a basis for an assessment of policy through interviews with policy-makers. The book identifies a significant gap between what matters to parents and what is currently being offered in policy and service provision

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This volume examines Brazilian films released between 1995 and 2010, with special attention to issues of race, ethnicity and national identity.

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This is the first monograph on the performance and reception of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century national drama in contemporary Spain, which attempts to remedy the traditional absence of performance-based approaches in Golden Age studies. The book contextualises the socio-historical background to the modern-day performance of the country’s three major Spanish baroque playwrights (Calderón de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

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Work on the miners' Lock-Out of 1926 tends to focus on the perspective of the National Union of Mineworkers, while nothing has been written which attempts to examine, for example, how miner's wives coped for six months without pay. "The Women and Men of 1926" investigates the Lock-Out from the perspective of gender relations, offering a social history of the mining communities in south Wales during the Lock-Out. Sue Bruley aims to analyse how individual families and households coped with the Lock-Out and to assess how gender relations were affected, using hitherto unpublished oral testimony as well as other archive material. Individual chapters consider topics such as school canteens, miners' lodges, recreational activities, picketing and politics.

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