Search results for ""university of wales press""

The twin focus of this book is on the importance of the Spanish heritage on nation and state building in nineteenth-century Spanish-speaking Latin America, alongside processes of nation and state building in Spain and Latin America. Rather than concentrating purely on nationalism and national identity, the book explores the linkages that remained or were re-established between Spain and her former colonies; as has increasingly been recognised in recent decades, the nineteenth century world was marked by the rise of the modern nation state, but also by the development of new transnational connections, and this book accounts for these processes within a Hispanic context.

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María Zambrano (1904–91) is widely regarded as one of the most original Spanish thinkers of the twentieth century. Her biggest contribution to intellectual history is undoubtedly her poetic reason and her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Spanish Republican thinker has only been recognised in recent decades. The purpose of this monograph is to reveal the political dimension inherent to Zambrano’s proposal for an alternative rationality through interrogation of existing assumptions regarding Zambrano’s thought.

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R. S. Thomas is recognised globally as one of the major poets of the twentieth century. Such detailed attention as has been paid to the religious dimensions of his work has, however, largely limited itself to such matters as his obsession with the ‘absent God’, his appalled fascination with the mixed cruelty and wonder of a divinely created world, his interest in the world-view of the ‘new physics’, and his increasingly heterodox stance on spiritual matters. What has been largely neglected is his central indebtedness to key features of the ‘classic’ Christian tradition. This book concentrates on one powerful and compelling example of this, reading Thomas’s great body of religious work in the light of the three days that form the centre of the Gospel narrative; the days which tell of the death, entombment and resurrection of Christ.

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Fukuyama’s concept of the End of History has been one of the most widely debated theories of international politics since the end of the Cold War. This book discusses Fukuyama’s claim that liberal democracy alone is able to satisfy the human aspiration for freedom and dignity, and explores the way in which his thinking is part of a philosophical tradition which includes Kant, Hegel and Marx. Two new chapters in this second edition discuss the ways in which Fukuyama’s thinking has developed – they include his celebrated and controversial criticism of neoconservatism and his complex intellectual relationship to Samuel Huntington, whose Clash of Civilization thesis he rejects but whose notion of political decay is central to his more recent work. The authors here argue that Fukuyama’s continuing fundamental contributions to debates concerning the spread of democracy and threat of global terror mark him out as one of the most important thinkers of the twenty-first century.

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The cult of St Ursula and the 11,000 virgins was one of the most popular and relic-rich of all saints’ cults in the medieval period. This volume constitutes the first interdisciplinary collection of essays in English to explore the development and transmission of the legend of St Ursula in detail, considering a wealth of different sources including physical remains, literary texts, artistic representations and medieval music.

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Gangsters, aviators, hard-boiled detectives, gunslingers, jazz and images of the American metropolis were all an inextricable part of the cultural landscape of interwar France. While the French 1930s have long been understood as profoundly anti-American, this book shows how a young, up-and-coming generation of 1930s French writers and filmmakers approached American culture with admiration as well as criticism. For some, the imaginary America that circulated through Hollywood films, newspaper reports, radio programming and translated fiction represented the society of the future, while for others it embodied a dire threat to French identity. This book brings an innovative transatlantic perspective to 1930s French culture, focusing on several of the most famous figures from the 1930s – including Marcel Carné, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Julien Duvivier, André Malraux, Jean Renoir and Jean-Paul Sartre – to track the ways in which they sought to reinterpret the political and social dimensions of modernism for mass audiences via an imaginary America.

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Certain simple and stereotypical images of Wales strike an immediate chord with the public, both in Wales itself and beyond its borders. For much of the twentieth century, the country was thought of as ‘The Valleys’, a land of miners and choirs and rugby clubs. This image of a ‘Proletarian Wales’ (with its attendant Socialist politics) dominated popular imagination, just as the image of ‘Nonconformist Wales’ – a Wales of chapels and of a grimly puritan society – had gripped the imagination of the High Victorian era. But what of the Wales of the late Victorian and Edwardian decades? What image of Wales prevailed at that time of revolutionary social, economic, cultural, religious and political change? This book argues that several competing images of Welshness were put in circulation during that time, and proceeds to examine several of the most influential of these as they took the form of literary texts.

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This book brings together fourteen of the most ambitious and thought-provoking recent essays by David Punter, who has been writing on the Gothic to academic and general acclaim for over thirty years. Punter addresses developments in Gothic writing and Gothic criticism since the mid-eighteenth century, by isolating and discussing specific themes and scenarios that have remained relevant to literary and philosophical discussion over the decades and centuries, and also by paying close attention to the motifs, figures and recurrences that loom so large in twenty-first-century engagements with the Gothic. This book, while engaging deeply with Gothic history, constantly addresses our continuing immediate encounters with Gothic tropes – the vampire, the zombie, the phantom, the living dead.

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The years between 1906 and 1939 in Europe were characterized by a concern, expressed in political, economic, social and religious terms, about the social conditions which had resulted from more than a century of industrialization. Seeking God’s Kingdom examines the work of Welsh Nonconformity’s four main protagonists of social thinking: David Miall Edwards, Thomas Rees, Herbert Morgan and John Morgan Jones. It explores the ways in which they were influenced by European intellectual and philosophical ideas, showing how religion was reinterpreted by them to promote social improvement, and the book assesses the strengths and weaknesses of their approach. Archetypal theological liberals rather than specifically social gospellers, their conclusions were undermined towards the end of the period by changes and developments in the current of European religious thought. This is a comprehensive and fascinating study of liberal theology’s attempt to come to terms with the demands and challenges of an industrialized society. Contents 1. Preface to the Second Edition 2. Discovering Jerusalem 3. Wales and the Social Gospel 4. A Crisis of Faith 5. The Question of Context

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During the nineteenth century, the Age of Nationalism, small stateless nations all over Europe developed successful national movements which demanded rights for minority language communities. One of the central questions of Welsh history is why this didn’t happen in Wales. Welsh patriotism emphasised radicalism and liberalism, which subsumed Wales within the discourse of British progressive politics. Liberalism promotes majoritarian identities, and in Wales is a key component of British hegemony. Wales in the nineteenth century was more liberal and radical than almost any other country in Europe. Contrary to the popular view that this was a boost for Welsh nationalism, Pam na fu Cymru (Why Wales never happened) shows that this was the very reason for its failure.

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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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For the first time, the speeches of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales are being made available in a two-volume set in a collaborative effort by the University of Wales and the University of Maryland. Professors Suheil Bushrui and David Cadman have brought together a selection of speeches and articles by The Prince of Wales covering a period of over forty years, gathered together under headings that cover his principal interests and activities: the natural environment, expressed both as farming, forestry and fisheries, and then as climate change; architecture and the built environment; integrated medicine and health; society, religion and tradition; education, The Prince’s Trust and Business in the Community. These volumes, intended as a work of reference, show The Prince of Wales as his ideas, knowledge and experience develop, from his first speech at the age of twenty in 1968 to his more recent speeches in 2012. What is most noteworthy, however, is that though the style of the speeches and articles have changed over the years, the overall message has remained consistent – not only in terms of environmental degradation and climate change, but also in matters relating to healthcare, urban form, organic farming and the need for greater respect and understanding between religions – all of which speaks volumes for The Prince’s passion for and commitment to what he believes, even in times when his ideas were unconventional.

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This book in the series Gender Studies in Wales uses representations of pregnancy and menstruation as a basis to interpret a wide range of Welsh fiction by women; a perspective of striking novelty in the context of contemporary Welsh.

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Barcelona: Visual Culture, Space and Power offers a unique approach to the history of the avantgarde in Barcelona, as well as its legacy in the post-war period. It presents the relationship between environment, identity and performance as explored by countercultural artists and communities from the 1960s to the present day.

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Poetry, Geography, Gender explores literary and geographical analysis, cultural criticism and gender politics in the work of such well-known literary figures as Gwyneth Lewis, Menna Elfyn, Christine Evans and Gillian Clarke, alongside newer names like Zoe Skoulding and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch. Drawing on her unpublished interviews with many of the featured poets, Alice Entwistle examines how and why their various senses of affiliation with a shared cultural hinterland should encourage us to rethink the relationship between nation, identity and literary aesthetics in post-devolution Wales. This series of lively and detailed close readings reveals how writers use the textual terrain of the poem, both literally and metaphorically, to register and script aesthetic as well as geo-political and cultural-historical change. As an innovative critical study, this volume thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first-century Wales.

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This innovative collection of essays in the field of Theatre and Performance Studies in Welsh represents some of the key discussions in the discipline in recent years.

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This volume examines long-term processes of social change and settlement practices in later prehistoric and early medieval Wales. As a case-study, it examines the settlement archaeology of north-west Wales encompassing the counties of Gwynedd, Anglesey and west Conwy, and covering a period of two millennia from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Early Medieval period (1150 BC - AD 1050). The shifting dynamics underlying society are examined throughout this period in the introductory chapters via an exploration of settlement and hill fort architectures, the distribution patterns of site-types, and the histories of particular places, with comparisons drawn from the evidence in other regions of Britain and Ireland. Much of the data comes from the grey literatures and Gwynedd Archaeological Trust Historic Environment Record, making much unpublished information available for the first time.

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Austria today offers the picture of a small, neutral, and economically successful country in the heart of Europe. Yet modern Austria is the product of a complex and violent history. After the First World War, Vienna changed overnight from being the capital of a large continental and multi-ethnic Empire to being an alpine Republic surrounded by larger states. This study examines Austria's transition from a major power and multi-ethnic Empire to a militarily marginalised alpine Republic, and asks how those often sudden and violent changes, including two world wars and one civil war in the twentieth century, have been reflected in the way Austrians have perceived themselves. Whilst many studies map out the political events, this study places special emphasis on the language used by Austrians as they struggled to define themselves.

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Edward Pugh (1763-1813) was a Ruthin-born, Welsh-speaking artist and writer who produced compelling landscapes images of Denbighshire in particular and, more widely of North Wales, Monmouthshire and London. He also wrote what is probably the best account of a tour in Wales ever written: it is far superior to Borrow's. This book, the first to consider Pugh's work in detail, shows how his landscapes reveal a wealth of local knowledge, and dramatise some issues of great importance to Wales in his time: the effects of the enclosure of common land; the effects of the war with France on industry and the condition of the poor; the need to develop and modernise the Welsh economy; the power of the great landowners. Apart from Pugh's, almost all the pictures and tours we have of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers. None of these can tell us about life in North Wales with the same insight as Pugh.

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Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and human environments. Poverty also goes against the core values of democratic societies. Lotter talks about poverty in ways that depict this devastating human condition clearly. He shows why inequalities associated with poverty require our serious moral concern. To eradicate poverty appropriately, shared ethical values must guide aid. In addition, a proper conception of justice can prevent poverty from occurring. Furthermore, we must re-imagine the role of the state to enable collective human responsibility for poverty's successful eradication.

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Sleepy rustic Carmarthenshire was secretly a hotbed of debauchery, violence and drunkenness according to Russell Davies in a new edition of his very successful book, Secret Sins. Behind the facade of idyllic rural life, there was a twilight world of mental illness, suicide, crime, vicious assaults, infanticide, cruelty and other assorted acts of depravity. This almost anecdotal historical study is often funny, sometimes disturbing, always revealing.

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The first comprehensive history of law in Wales from before the Romans to Devolution.

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King Copper is the first full treatment of the impact of the copper industry upon society and environment in south Wales. For the whole of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth a belt of coastal smelters using local coals and ores from Cornwall, Cuba and Chile produced virtually all of Britain's copper and much of the worlds. It was a remarkable industrial concentration that brought wealth to Swansea, the centre of the industry, and to neighbouring towns. But there was a price for prosperity. Copper ores are notoriously impure and the many roastings and meltings required to drive out the impurities and separate the metal from the ore produced mountains of slag and furnace ash and billowing clouds of toxic, foul-smelling smoke. Laced with sulphur and arsenic, the smoke killed all but the hardiest plants, ruining crops and killing and disabling grazing animals. This continual chafing of a farmed and settled countryside set farmers against townsmen, the Welsh-speaking Cymry Cymraeg against their Anglo-Welsh cousins in the towns. The conflict culminated in a series of dramatic 'smoke' trials in which farmers and landowners sued the copper companies for damage to crops, grazing and stock. Seldom has the rural-urban dichotomy been so exposed. The smoke disputes centred on damage to property but they also raised questions about public health and the loss of attractive and loved landscapes.

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The serial literature current in Wales between 1789 and 1802 is the most important public repository of radical, loyalist and patriotic Welsh responses to the French Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars. This anthology presents a selection of poetry and prose published in the annual Welsh almanacs, the English provincial newspapers published close to Wales's border and the three radical Welsh periodicals of the mid-1790s, together with translations of the Welsh texts. An extended introduction sketches out the printing culture of Wales, analyses its public discourse and interprets the Welsh voices in their British political context.

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The Glossa Ordinaria, the medieval glossed Bible first printed in 1480/81, has been a rich source of biblical commentary for centuries. Circulated first in manuscript, the text is the Latin Vulgate Bible of St. Jerome with patristic commentary both in the margins and within the text itself.

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The events of the period 1485 - 1660 were decisive in the development of modern Wales and, in Hugh Thomas' first in the four-volume "Welsh History Text Books" series, students are presented with a scholarly, balanced and informative discussion. From the crowning of Henry Tudor as King of England in 1485 to the profoundly transformed religious, cultural and economic conditions at the end of the period under survey, Wales and Welsh society would stride forward in a committed partnership within a greater Britain.

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Wales has a long history of interest in Palestine and Israel, and a close interest in Jews and Zionism. This monograph, the first to explore the subject, asks searching questions about the relationship that Wales has with the Israel-Palestine situation. Surveying Welsh missionary writing, fictional imaging of Jews, and the political use of Palestine and Israel, it challenges received wisdom about Welsh tolerance and liberalism, and identifies a complex and unique relationship. Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine makes an important contribution to international Jewish studies, to the study of British colonial involvement in Palestine, and to Welsh and Jewish literary and cultural history.)

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This book explores the ways in which the distinctive Welsh county of Cardigan and its inhabitants (known as Cardis) have been represented during the late modern era. The image of both Cardiganshire and the Cardi changed considerably during this period, and this representational history examines the reasons why these shifts took place. In doing so, the study uncovers an array of opinions about the county. Each of these viewpoints are analysed, placed in context and set against one another. The picture which emerges is of a place and a people onto which commentators projected their hopes and fears.

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Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.

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The aim of this book is to engender Mexican folk art and locate women at its centre by studying the processes of creation, distribution, and consumption, as well as examining iconographic aspects, and elements of class and ethnicity, from the perspective of gender.

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This book narrates the history of Owain Myfyr (Owen Jones) - from his birth in Llanfihangel Glyn Myfyr in 1741 through to his death in London in 1814. It pays particular attention to his career as a literary sponsor. The book also explores the centrality of Owain to the welsh antiquarian movement that blossomed in London during the period 1787-1807. Without his vision, leadership and readiness to spend his own money on sponsoring scholars the intense activity of this period would not have been possible. This will be the first attempt to write a biography of Owain Myfyr. Unil now, very little has been written specifically on him. Most of what is available tends to misrepresent his understanding of those manuscripts in which he so readily invested his own money. This manuscript, however, will try to reach a more balanced conclusion by analysing the available evidence and giving a more detailed deconstruction of his character and legacy. Despite not being a scholar,as such, he came to influence many of the key Welsh scholars of his day and continued to be an influence after his death.

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Analyzes the state of the Welsh language at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This title aims to update our understanding of Welsh as a living language; how its use, learning, understanding teaching, evolution and promulgation are developing in the world of the 21st century where Welsh is spreading to the internet and encyclopaedias.

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This book assesses how policies developed by the National Assembly for Wales are affecting gender inequalities and investigates whether they are having an impact on social justice for women in Wales. In 1999 the first elections to devolved governments took place in Scotland and Wales. In Wales this resulted in 40 per cent of Assembly Members being women. In 2003 this proportion increased to 50 per cent which makes the National Assembly for Wales 'the first legislative body with equal numbers of men and women in the world' ("The Guardian", 3/5/03). This new gender balance of political representatives is a significant change in the gendering of political institutions and this, together with the creation of a new tier of government, has the potential to create new opportunities for the development of social policies which address gender and other social inequalities. Focusing on distinct policy domains, this book explores gender politics in a devolved Wales. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of social policy, exploring the way it has developed since devolution and the extent to which considerations of gender and social justice for women are central to this development. The empirical chapters which form the core of the book are situated theoretically and politically by the first chapter which discusses how gender and social justice can be theorised and explores devolution and its relation to gender politics in Wales.

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An introduction to the work of one of Wales's leading writers, highlighting his importance to contemporary critical and cultural agendas such as issues of identity, nation, environment and religious conflict.

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The first volume ever in the Welsh language to concentrate solely on the history of Western philosophy. It discusses the ideas of great philosophers, from Thales in the sixth century Before Christ, to Karl Popper, who died in 1994.

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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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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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