Search results for ""university of wales press""

This ground breaking volume brings together contributions from scholars across a range of disciplines (including literary studies, history, geography and archaeology) to investigate questions of space, place and identity in the medieval city. Using Chester as a case study - with attention to its location on the border between England and Wales, its rich multilingual culture and surviving material fabric - the essays recover the experience and understanding of the urban space by individuals and groups within the medieval city, and offer new readings from the vantage-point of twenty-first century disciplinary and theoretical perspectives.

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A fascinating survey of the numerous references to Arthur found in medieval Welsh literature emphasising the diverse literary genres used and the multifaceted portrayal of the character. New edition.

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Welsh Periodicals in English celebrates the contribution of English-language periodicals to the careers of Welsh writers (from Lewis Morris to Owen Sheers) and to the practice of their editors (from Charles Wilkins (1882) to Emily Trahair (2012)). These periodicals have helped to create an active Anglophone public sphere in Wales and continue to stimulate discussion on a wide range of topics: tensions between tradition and continuity; the role of magazines in developing new writers; gender issues; relations with Welsh-language journals; the involvement of the periodicals in social and political issues, and their contribution to cultural developments in Wales. A detailed study of the design, content and editorial practice of the periodicals is illuminated by discussions with living editors, and the book concludes with a discussion on the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary productions and a comparison with their successful equivalents in Ireland.

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A lively and scholarly introduction to early Welsh poetry up to the period of court poetry, with notes on style, background and translations of the poems themselves; suitable for sixth form and college students, and anyone interested in Welsh poetic tradition. First published in 1976.

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The late eighteenth century was one of the most exciting and unsettling periods in European history, with the shock-waves of the French Revolution rippling around the world. As this collection of essays by leading scholars shows, Wales was no exception. From political pamphlets to a Denbighshire folk-play, from bardic poetry to the remodelling of the Welsh landscape itself, responses to the revolutionary ferment of ideas took many forms. We see how Welsh poets and preachers negotiated complex London - Wales networks of patronage and even more complex issues of national and cultural loyalty; and how the landscape itself is reimagined in fiction, remodelled a la Rousseau, while it rapidly emptied as impoverished farming families emigrated to the New World. Drawing on a wealth of vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished, this collection marks another important contribution to 'four nations' criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and flashpoints of Romantic-period Wales.

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Parents, Personalities and Power: Welsh-medium Schools in South-east Wales is the first volume ever published to investigate in depth the interdependent influences on the phenomenal growth of such schools over the last half century. Derived from a sustained research investigation based in the School of Welsh, Cardiff University (2003 - 8), the research is set within a constantly evolving linguistic, social and political society. The authors underline the international interest in the sustainable and continuing growth of the Ysgolion Cymraeg, and, as the title suggests, note the various powers that have influenced the shaping of the Welsh-school movement. These reflect the increased interest in the language and identity of Wales and the future challenges these schools face.

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Margiad wrote about the elderly, about love between women, about elusive, enigmatic characters. She is renowned for her ability to depict place, yet she also makes place reflective of the emotional and spiritual lives of her characters and her own concerns as an artist. Evans was a border writer, concerned with cultural complexity and conflict characteristic of borderlands, but also filled with passion for the landscape of the borders and the many meanings, local and figurative; she effortlessly invests in the places she loved. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumour that lead to her early death, on the evening of her forty-ninth birthday, in 1958. Evans wrote A Ray of Darkness, an acclaimed autobiography about her experience of epilepsy, and as a result Margiad Evans is being 'rediscovered' by the medical community as it becomes more interested in patient experiences. This collection of essays assesses Evans's extraordinary literary legacy, from her use of folktale and the gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

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In the period following the French revolution in 1789, Welsh poets continually reflected on the extraordinary new era in which they lived through their writing. Effortlessly ranging from Wales's deep and distant history to accounts of the most topical and urgent current affairs, their poems on war, Welshness, druids, parted lovers and sublime landscapes encompass the beautiful, the brutal and the mysterious. Facing a future that often seemed agonisingly uncertain, poets in Wales used their verses to voice their thoughts and feelings about events that had rocked the whole of Europe, and whose effects continued to be felt long after 1789. This new selection of poetry from Wales sets recently-discovered manuscript texts alongside little-known early printed poems, offering a full and accessible introduction to Welsh poetry in English in the period 1780-1820.

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Women's Writing and Muslim Societies looks at the rise in works concerning Muslim societies by both western and Muslim women - from pioneering female travellers like Freya Stark and Edith Wharton in the early twentieth century, whose accounts of the Orient were usually playful and humorous, to the present day and such works as Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran and Betty Mahmoody's Not Without My Daughter, which present a radically different view of Muslim Societies marked by fear, hostility and even disgust. The author, Sharif Gemie, also considers a new range of female Muslim writers whose works suggest a variety of other perspectives that speak of difficult journeys, the problems of integration, identity crises and the changing nature of Muslim cultures; in the process, this volume examines varied journeys across cultural, political and religious borders, discussing the problems faced by female travellers, the problems of trans-cultural romances and the difficulties of constructing dialogue between enemy camps.

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Proust and the Visual is an edited volume of essays written by Proustian specialists, concerned with a rich phenomenological category, the "visual" whose prominent role in the novel is at the heart of its modernity. The "visual" is defined as manifesting in the image not only space, but also time. The "visual" is considered as a category that delineates the conditions of possibility of all visibility and constitutes an integral part of both the progression of the narrator's journey towards becoming a writer and of the unfolding of the novel itself.

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This is the first title in a new series of volumes examining different dimensions of the media and culture in small nations. Whether at a local, national or international level, radio has played and continues to play a key role in nurturing or denying - even destroying - people's sense of 'belonging' to a particular community, whether it be defined in terms of place, ethnicity, language or patterns of consumption. Typically, the radio has been used for purposes of propaganda and as a means of forging national identity both at home and also further afield in the case of colonial exploits. Drawing on examples of four models of, the chapters in this volume will provide an historical and contemporary overview of radio in a number of small nations. The authors propose a stimulating discussion on the role radio has played in a variety of nation contexts worldwide.

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Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity explores the intersections of Gothic, cultural, gender, queer, socio-economic and postcolonial theories in nineteenth-century British representations of sexuality, gender, class and race. From mid-century authors like Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell to fin-de-siecle writers such as J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Florence Marryat and Vernon Lee, this study examines the ways that these Victorian writers utilized gothic horror as a proverbial 'safe space' in which to grapple with taboo social and cultural issues. This work simultaneously explores our current assumptions about a Victorian culture that was monolithic in its disdain for those who were 'other'.

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The present volume is the first study in the English language to focus specifically on Italian crime fiction, weaving together a historical perspective and a thematic approach, with a particular focus on the representation of space, especially city space, gender, and the tradition of impegno, the social and political engagement which characterised the Italian cultural and literary scene in the postwar period. The 8 chapters in this volume explore the distinctive features of the Italian tradition from the 1930s to the present, by focusing on a wide range of detective and crime novels by selected Italian writers, some of whom have an established international reputation, such as C. E. Gadda, L. Sciascia and U. Eco, whilst others may be relatively unknown, such as the new generation of crime writers of the Bologna school and Italian women crime writers. Each chapter examines a specific period, movement or group of writers, as well as engaging with broader debates over the contribution crime fiction makes more generally to contemporary Italian and European culture. The editor and contributors of this volume argue strongly in favour of reinstating crime fiction within the canon of Italian modern literature by presenting this once marginalised literary genre as a body of works which, when viewed without the artificial distinction between high and popular literature, shows a remarkable insight into Italy's postwar history, tracking its societal and political troubles and changes as well as often also engaging with metaphorical and philosophical notions of right or wrong, evil, redemption, and the search of the self.

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The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy's romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century

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In R.S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

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Edward Thomas: The Origins of his Poetry builds a new theoretical framework for critical work on imaginative composition through an investigation of Edward Thomas's composing processes, on material from his letters, his poems and his prose books. It looks at his relation to the land and landscape and includes detailed and illuminating new readings of his poems and close study of many of his hitherto relatively neglected prose works. It traces new and surprising connections between Thomas's approach to composition and the writing and thought of Freud, Woolf and William James, and introduces the significant influence of Japanese aesthetics on Thomas. Analysis of his drafts, layout and typographic and handwritten habits also illumine both his completed poetry and his approach to composition. The sustained study of some of Thomas's voluminous correspondence with fellow poets and writers helps also to provide an epistolary reading of his work. The result is not only an ambitious, detailed original consideration of Thomas as writer of poetry and prose but also a surprising and far-reaching analysis of poetic composition with wide-reaching implications for early twentieth-century aesthetic theory, and the limits or the conditions of the sayable, and, through the subtle use of epigraphs from a wide-range of differing sources, the location of the specific readings of Thomas in a much wider intellectual context .

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The Rebecca Riots in west Wales began in the summer of 1839. They ceased as suddenly as they had started, and for three and a half years the countryside was undisturbed. Then, in the winter of 1842, they broke out again with greater violence. By day the countryside seemed quiet, but at night fantastically disguised horsemen, many dressed as women, careered along highways and through narrow lanes on their mysterious errands. The movement has been unusually been represented as the uprising of an oppressed peasantry, particularly against the burden of the toll-gates. Its causes, however, were far more deep-seated than that.

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Tolkien and Wales is the first book to offer a detailed examination of the influence of Wales on Tolkien's fiction and scholarly work, including some relatively neglected texts.

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This study of Bram Stoker focuses on Stoker as a Gothic writer. Identified with Dracula, Stoker is largely responsible for taking the Gothic away from medieval castles and placing it at the center of modern life. The study examines Stoker's contribution to the modern notion of Gothic and thus to the history of popular culture and demonstrates that the excess generally associated with the Gothic is Stoker's way of examining the social, economic, and political problems. His relevance today is his depiction of problems that continue to haunt us at the beginning of the twenty first century. What makes the current study unique is that it privileges Stoker's use of the Gothic but also addresses that Stoker wrote seventeen other books plus numerous articles and short stories. Since a number of these works are decidedly not Gothic, the study puts his Gothic novels and short stories into the perspective of everything that he wrote. The creator of Dracula also wrote The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a standard reference work for clerks in the Irish civil service, as well as The Man and Lady Athlyne, two delightful romances. Furthermore, Stoker was fascinated with technological development and racial and gender development at the end of the century as well as in supernatural mystery. Indeed the study demonstrates that the tension between the things that can be explained rationally and the things that cannot is important to our understanding of Stoker as a Gothic writer.

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"A History of Wales: 1815-1906" is the third volume in a series beginning with 1485. This invaluable textbook offers a major new study of the principal changes of this dynamic era. The first half studies the period 1815-1850 in considerable detail while the second half considers the major changes that occurred after 1850. The chapters are organized in such a way as to outline the main industrial, social, political and cultural changes of the century. Each chapter contains a comprehensive reading list for those wishing to continue their studies.

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Despite the great changes that the twentieth century brought to the lives and roles of the women of rural Wales, there has been scant attention paid to the topic by social scientists and historians, even within Wales. "Mothers, Wives and Changing Lives" rectifies that mistake, drawing on a wealth of family stories about women's roles in education, the church, and the family in order to address significant gaps in our knowledge of women and Welsh culture.

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This book is the first biography of Huw T. Edwards (1929 - 1970), a key figure in the Welsh labour movement, who was known in the 1950s as the 'unofficial Prime Minister of Wales'. He was of working-class origin, a Welsh speaker and trade unionist involved in a wide range of activities associated with Welsh culture. He represented Wales to the BBC, chaired the Welsh Tourist Board, and was president of the Welsh Language Society.

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Equality of opportunity is a contested concept. It evokes strong emotions from proponents and opponents alike. Enduring issues of inequality and discrimination mean that it remains at the forefront of political priorities in the twenty-first century. Traditional analyses tend to focus on developments at the level of the unitary state or European Union. In contrast, this book underlines the salience of multi-level governance and offers the first detailed comparative analysis of contemporary efforts to promote equality of opportunity in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. It presents a summary of social theory on equalities in relation to gender, and a full range of social groups and identities - such as disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation and age. It outlines the contemporary evidence base relating to patterns and processes of inequality in the 'devolved' nations. A 'governance perspective' is also advanced; one that details how constitutional law establishing the devolved legislatures contains equality clauses that enable and empower government to promote equality in public policy and law. Analysis reveals the development of distinctive regulatory structures and equalities policy lobbies in each territory. Overall, this volume charts the development of divergent legal rights and public policy on the promotion of equality in the wake of constitutional reform in the UK. Notwithstanding ongoing challenges, it is argued that the move to quasi-federalism is significant for it marks a shift from the predominant, centralised administration of social policy witnessed throughout the twentieth century, to divergent approaches designed to address contrasting socio-economic patterns and processes in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

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Sir David Hughes Parry QC was probably one of the most powerful and influential Welsh jurists of the twentieth century. As Professor of English Law at the University of London, he laid the foundations for the development of the Department of Law at the London School and Economics into a centre of excellence in legal scholarship. As founding Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, he created a vehicle that would raise the standing of English legal scholarship on the global stage. An astute operator in the world of university politics, he became Vice-Chancellor and, later, Chairman of the Court of the University of London, and served as Vice-Chairman of the powerful University Grants Committee. For the first time, this study provides a holistic account of his career as a lawyer, legal scholar, university policy-maker and law reformer. Using a range of primary and secondary sources, it locates his place in the history of legal scholarship and establishes his identity as a jurist. It also considers his distinctive and sometimes controversial contribution to the public life of Wales, and in particular its language, culture and institutions. The portrait that emerges is of a man whose energies were divided equally between his legal-academic interests and his devotion to serving the causes of his native Wales. This biography demonstrates that it was through his roles as a public intellectual and legal advisor to the Welsh nation that Hughes Parry bequeathed his most important and enduring legacies.

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Relates to one of Wales' most important institutions of higher education, covering its history from its creation in 1884 as the University College of North Wales, its incarnation as the University of Wales, Bangor and to its 125th anniversary in 2009. This book traces the institution's origins as an 18th century coaching inn with just 58 students.

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Comprises an introduction to the background of "The Dialogue", written in 1594 by George Owen of Henllys, north Pembrokeshire.

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This book is about Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, and why they matter today. It mainly concerns how pictures are understood by the people who use them - patrons, museum curators, and the general public - rather than by the painters who paint them. It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of painting, which are unified by a common theme. Individual chapters discuss an eighteenth-century painting, a nineteenth-century genre, a twentieth-century painter, how pictures are valued by museums and the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art establishment has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement. The chapters are unified by their concern with the question of how a tradition of art is created, and what effect a tradition has on how a nation sees itself - and is seen by others. The pictures and painters are discussed in the context of contemporary literature, and the social and political circumstances of their period. Comparisons are made with the experience of other cultures, notably the United States and Ireland.

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This book presents the classic works of Kant, Bentham and Rousseau together in a valuable and accessible style. It provides a contemporary 'compilation' of the eighteenth century's 'perpetual peace' proposals together with an introduction providing an overview of the perpetual peace ideal and its links to contemporary notions of global governance and cosmopolitan democracy.

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This book is an illustrated history of cricket in Wales, tracing the evolution of, and the fundamental role of the game in the culture and social history of the Principality. Indeed, cricket was the first team game to be played in Wales, with the first record of a match taking place dating back to 1783. During the 19th century its development helped to unite communities, and provide a common bond for the people of diverse origins who had found their way to the booming towns and cities. Cricket also had a special place in the rural communities, with games being played at folk festivals and other gatherings, and this book illustrates how these informal games, as well as the successes of Glamorgan CCC and other Welsh teams, have brought great pride and joy to the nation.

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This book examines from a variety of perspectives, and offers a range of interpretations, of the type of rhetoric associated with the anchoritic experience during the Middle Ages and draws conclusions on the many purposes of that rhetoric. In particular, each chapter will aim to unravel aspects of the often complex webs of association embedded within the rhetoric and imagery of anchoritic literature and the ways in which these associations travelled from within the anchorhold to the wider community of the laity beyond its walls. In so doing, it will argue for the centrality of anchoritic spirituality to the religious climate of the later Middle Ages in spite of the seemingly marginalized status of the anchorite within the social community which housed her/him.

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Religion has been a defining characteristic in Welsh national identity from the beginning. This book demonstrates how religion and faith have informed Welsh national identity from the seventeenth century to the present, touching upon the Puritan period, the Older Dissent of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century Nonconformity and the impact of secularism during the twentieth century. It asks whether religion has been part of the essence of Welshness, and whether that is still the case within the multicultural Wales of the twenty-first century.

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Uwe Timm is one of the most prominent, prolific and influential writers in contemporary German literature. His work addresses the dominant cultural themes in contemporary Germany, including memory, biography and Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Books in the "CGW" series originate in visits and lecturers to the Department of German at the University of Wales Swansea by prolific and critically acclaimed German writers. Uwe Timm's first visit to the Centre for Contemporary German Literature in Swansea produced one of the strongest volumes in the "Contemporary German Writers" series, and members of staff in the department have continued fruitful collaboration with the author in a number of areas. Timm continues to enjoy a considerable popular and critical reputation in Germany. Since the first CGW volume appeared, Timm has published a series of critically acclaimed works which justify a new volume, building on the success of the first. The first volume ends with Johannisnacht (1996); the second looks at his work since then and includes: a piece of previously unpublished writing by Timm; an overview, in German, of his career since 1996; an interview with Timm about his career since 1996; separate critical essays on the following: Nicht morgen, nicht gestern (1999, which includes a story set in Swansea); Rot (2001); Am Beispiel meines Bruders (2003); Der Freund und der Fremde (2005); The volume concludes with an updated bibliography.

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An account of the post 1975 development of Cardiff focusing on its post industrial economy and the impact of local governance and town planning on the character of the city.

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Few Welsh scholars in the modern era have served their profession, university and country as admirably as Sir Glanmor Williams, who died, aged eighty four, on 24 February 2005. By dint of intellectual brilliance, far-sighted vision and exceptional personal charm, he achieved great eminence in the field of Welsh historical studies. It is no exaggeration to claim that the flourishing condition of Welsh history during the last half century is in large measure attributable to his influence. This book seeks to draw out the religious, political, economic, social and educational threads in his work within a local, county, national and British context. It also examines his methodology in the context of the work of other historians within Wales and beyond.

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Medieval Wales had a separate system of law to that found in English, and the law has been preserved in several medieval manuscripts. One aspect of the law manuscripts is the large collections of legal triads, basically sentences listing things in threes. This book examines the legal triads, an important part of medieval Welsh law.

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This book will focus on religious matters in their contemporary context. The volume will be topical, with analysis of such diverse areas as religion and the cinema and the current global increase in fundamentalist religions. The proposed chapters are as follows: What is theology? What is the contemporary role of theology? Semper Reformanda - The nature and purpose of the church today; Worship; The Church in the World; Theology and Politics; Democracy: What does Christianity tell us? God and Evil: How does certitude relate to morality? Christianity amongst other religions; Fundamentalism - history and development; and, The Gospel and Visual Culture.

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Following the events of September 11, 2001, public focus has been on the power of religion. This book addresses the role of religious education in a world where terrorism has impacted on western democracy. Through an analysis and evaluation of the models of religious education, it considers if religion is part of the answer or part of the problem.

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The voyages of Captain Cook are endlessly fascinating to a wide audience, and no aspect of them has been more controversial than Cook's death. This book reprints one of the classic accounts of this episode, the vivid and lively narrative by one of the voyage surgeons, David Samwell. This book not only makes Samwell's "Narrative of the Death of Captain James Cook" readily available for the first time, but presents it with Samwell's previously unpublished letters relating to Cook's third voyage, and his poetry. The introductory essays discuss Samwell's contribution to our understanding of this dramatic period in Pacific and maritime history, and examine the personality and career of Samwell himself.

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Through a discussion of border identities, this book presents a balance-sheet of key developments in modern French society and culture in the context of globalization. It seeks to re-define and re-consider the notion of the border in respect of the identification of a variety of visible and invisible 'border' situations.

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This book analyses the 'waste versus profit' concept (as propounded by the British author Samuel Smiles and which found many supporters in mid-nineteenth century Spain) in the four novels of the "Torquemada series", by Benito Perez Galdos ("Torquemada en la hoguera" [1889], "Torquemada en la cruz" [1893], "Torquemada en el purgatorio" [1894] and "Torquemada y San Pedro" [1895]) within the context of the political economy and contemporary socio-cultural and medical debates. It investigates the extent to which notions of profit, efficiency and utility inform the "Torquemada" series by being juxtaposed with contemporary ideas on economic waste, inefficiency and loss, providing new insights into and a better understanding of the series.

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During Iolo Morganwg's lifetime Britain was obsessed with literary forgery. This book reveals the unexpected connections and hidden influences behind Britain's most successful (and hence, perhaps, least visible) Romantic forger. It explores Iolo's own strongly-held ideas about the Truth-historical, literary and religious.

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This book brings together the most current interpretations of the Wohunge Group from scholars currently working on the fields of medieval spirituality, gender, and the anchoritic tradition, providing literary, theological, linguistic, and cultural context for the works associated with the Wohunge Group (a collection of texts in English written by an unknown author in the late twelfth to early thirteenth centuries). These works are unique in their context - written almost certainly for a group of women living as anchoresses and recluses who were literate in English and were interested in guidance both in spiritual and worldly issues. The book discusses and explains the impact and significance of these works and situates them within the continuum of medieval theological and literary culture.

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Explores the link between logic, ethics and political theory. This book analyses the theoretical origins and application of the concept of intersubjectivity, arguing that post-Kantian philosophy (in Fichte, Schiller and Hegel) extends Kant's critique of Leibniz to yield a different theory of modern freedom, community and mutual recognition.

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Did King Edward I really give his baby son the title he had stolen from Gwynedd's native princes? Or was the truth a little more complex? This up-to-date and concise overview covers the origins of the title, Prince of Wales, and the lives and activities of its twenty-one "official" holders since the Statute of Rhuddlan confirmed Edward's conquest of Wales in 1284. From tragic youths to seasoned warriors, from sickly children to men who held the title into old age, they are all here, in a 700-year panorama of British royalty. The first book on the subject for over twenty years, Deborah Fisher's "Princes of Wales" acts as a useful companion volume to the "Pocket Guide on Princesses of Wales" by the same author. Readers will find that, just as with the princesses, the personalities of the princes, revealed in their public and private lives, are enormously varied, and yet they are bound together by many a common thread.

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Through a study of an 'invented' royal ceremony held in Wales in 1911 and again in 1969, "Investiture: Royal Ceremony and National Identity in Wales 1911-1969" explores the problematic, contested and changing relationship between nationality, ethnicity and the state in the United Kingdom. What happens to the meaning of the British monarchy when it leaves the English centre and crosses into the Celtic periphery? How does royal ceremony become a vehicle for defining and contesting the relationship between ethnicity, nationality and the state when it takes place amongst a problematic group like the Welsh? How are internal social and cultural divisions within the periphery represented, addressed and reconciled in such ceremonial? How do these relationships and the constellations of identity that they form change over time? This study explores the ethnic margins and imperial dimensions of British national identity through the ceremonies of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales and the public reaction to them. Through the vehicle of ascribing meaning to this royal ceremony, competing parties and social groups defined alternative and often conflicting models of Welshness and its relationship to British national identity, the British state and the British Empire.

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This book is the reconstruction of a critical theory of modernity. 'The Theory of Modernity' is divided into four parts: freedom, equality, solidarity and responsibility. The first three follow the basic ideas of the constitutional revolutions of the 18th century.

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The Wales TUC is the national institution representing the organised workers of Wales. Joe England seeks to explain and assess its achievements over the past thirty years of dramatic change: the rundown of the coal and steel industries, the decline in manufacturing jobs, the growth of white-collar employment and unions, the Thatcher and Major years of high unemployment and industrial law reform, and the increasing numbers of low-paid part-time workers, most of them women. Throughout the period the Wales TUC has negotiated with a succession of Secretaries of State of varying persuasions, consistently promoting the case for investment in jobs and fair treatment for workers. A leading campaigner for a Welsh Assembly it now has to adjust to the demands of that body whilst seeking to halt the decline in trade union membership and promote partnership with industry. The result is a book that is relevant not only to the study of recent Welsh political and industrial history and to an understanding of pressure group politics, but also to labour history and industrial relations.

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This volume draws upon academic research to provide an accessible account of the way that the changes introduced by devolved governance are transforming the role of women in contemporary Welsh politics. It sets out current ideas in academic thinking and why political and social scientists are excited about, and interested in, devolution. It is based on original interviews with participants as well as a wide range of secondary sources. It draws upon research in Scotland and Northern Ireland in order to place the events reported on within the wider context of devolution in the UK. The volume begins by examining how women activists used the political opportunities afforded by constitutional reform to further gender equality and women's participation in politics. These actions led to unique, and as yet little known, innovations such as the Welsh Assembly's statutory duty to promote equality of opportunity. This account examines the background to, and effects of affirmative action taken by three political parties such that the new Welsh legislature has the second highest proportion of women elected representatives amongst national government bodies in Europe. It explores the notable development whereby women are in a majority in the Welsh executive's cabinet. Against the background of pro-devolution rhetoric that stated the case for a 'new politics' based on 'inclusiveness', this volume presents a timely assessment of a new phase in Wales's history; one that has redefined women's role in contemporary Welsh politics.

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