Search results for ""university of wales press""

Le Bone Florence of Rome　is a Middle English tail-rhyme romance whose unique copy dates to the late fifteenth century. An analogue of Chaucer’s　Man of Law’s Tale, it　follows the adventures of a heroine who survives multiple exiles, sexual harassments and false accusations. At the same time, it explores such issues as the abuse of power, the stakes of global conflict, women’s place in society and their control over their destiny, all of which are treated in significantly different ways from the Constance story and other medieval tales of calumniated women. This fresh edition is accompanied by a complete line-by-line translation, which makes this text　accessible to readers at all levels. Its introduction offers a comprehensive analysis of the themes, ideologies and literary relationships of the romance, together with new insights into its local connections and a detailed description of its manuscript context.

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Le Bone Florence of Rome　is a Middle English tail-rhyme romance whose unique copy dates to the late fifteenth century. An analogue of Chaucer’s　Man of Law’s Tale, it　follows the adventures of a heroine who survives multiple exiles, sexual harassments and false accusations. At the same time, it explores such issues as the abuse of power, the stakes of global conflict, women’s place in society and their control over their destiny, all of which are treated in significantly different ways from the Constance story and other medieval tales of calumniated women. This fresh edition is accompanied by a complete line-by-line translation, which makes this text　accessible to readers at all levels. Its introduction offers a comprehensive analysis of the themes, ideologies and literary relationships of the romance, together with new insights into its local connections and a detailed description of its manuscript context.

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Mae Perfformio'r Genedl yn gyfrol sy'n cloriannu a chydnabod cyfraniad Hywel Teifi Edwards i'r broses bwysig o ddiffinio anian ac athrylith perfformiadol cenedl y Cymry. Dyma ymgais arloesol i ddathlu cyfraniad Edwards i faes nas cloriannir yn benodol mewn un cyfraniad canolog ganddo, ond sydd yn brigo i'r wyneb drwyddi draw mewn ystod eang o'i weithiau unigol. Archwilir nifer o agweddau gwahanol ar waith y gellid ei uno o dan bennawd cyffredinol - sef astudiaeth o'r perfformiadol yng nghyd-destun twf cysyniad o hunaniaeth genedlaethol Cymru, o'r ddeunawfed ganrif hyd at y presennol. Mae'r gyfrol yn canoli ar themau amrywiol yng ngwaith Edwards, megis Pasiant Cenedlaethol Cymru, yr Eisteddfod Genedlaethol, traddodiadau'r Orsedd, y drafodaeth o ddramau cynnar y mudiad drama, a'r dogfennu ar weithgaredd cwmniau drama amatur. Dadleuir bod modd cysylltu'r amryw themau yn ei waith a'u trafod yng nghyd-destun astudiaeth o'r anian perfformiadol yng nghyfansoddiad y Cymry.

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Graciliano Ramos and the Making of Modern Brazil brings updated criticism in English on the work of the prominent Brazilian writer Graciliano Ramos (1892–1953), a key figure in understanding the making of modern Brazil. Building on existing literature, this book innovates through chapters that consider issues such as Ramos’s dialogue with literary tradition, his cultural legacy for contemporary writers, and his treatment of racial discrimination and gender inequality through the multifarious, provocative and enduringly fascinating characters he created. The volume also addresses the question of Ramos’s political involvement during the years of the Getulio Vargas government (1930–45), to revisit established readings of the author’s politics. Through close reading of individual works as well as comparative analyses, this volume takes readers into the complexities of modernisation in Brazil, and highlights the writer’s significance for our understanding of Brazil today.

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The Elect Methodists is the first full-length academic study of Calvinistic Methodism, a movement that emerged in the eighteenth century as an alternative to the better known Wesleyan grouping. While the branch of Methodism led by John Wesley has received significant historical attention, Calvinistic Methodism, especially in England, has not. The book charts the sources of the eighteenth-century Methodist revival in the context of Protestant evangelicalism emerging in continental Europe and colonial North America, and then proceeds to follow the fortunes in both England and Wales of the Calvinistic branch, to the establishing of formal denominations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

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One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

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Written to celebrate the prestigious career of Professor Denys Pringle, this collection of articles produced by many of the leading archaeologists and historians in the field of crusades studies offers a compilation of pioneering scholarship on recent studies on the Latin East. The geographical breadth of topics discussed in each chapter reflects both Pringle’s international collaborations and research interests, and the wide development of scholarly interest in the subject. With a concentration on the areas corresponding to the crusader states during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the articles also offer research into the neighbouring areas of Cyprus, Anatolia, Greece and the West, and the legacy of the crusader period there, with results from recent archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East.

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The sonnets written during the Spanish Golden Age of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are among the finest poems written in the Spanish language. This book presents over one hundred of the best and most representative sonnets of that period, together with translations into English sonnets and detailed critical commentaries. Garcilaso de la Vega, Góngora and Quevedo receive particular attention, but other poets such as Aldana, Lope de Vega and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz are also well represented. A substantial introduction provides accounts of the sonnet genre, of the historical and literary background, and of the problems faced by the translator of sonnets. The aim of this volume is to provide semantically accurate translations that bring the original sonnets to life in modern English as true sonnets: not just aids to the comprehension of the originals but also lively and enjoyable poems in their own right.

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Trefor M. Owen’s seminal work educates, enlightens and entertains with a far-reaching yet accessible text, which paints a colourful and comprehensive portrait of a nation’s rich folk culture. The Customs and Traditions of Wales is an illuminating and engrossing insight into a subject that continues to unfold and develop in contemporary life. Despite an increasingly globalised society that has transformed local communities, folk customs are still practised and enjoyed the world over as people combine modern-day and historical rituals and embrace opportunities to learn about their past, and Owen’s influential study has maintained its relevance as customs change and evolve.

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The Arthur of the North is the first book-length study of the Arthurian literature that was translated from French and Latin into Old Norse-Icelandic in the thirteenth century, which has been preserved mostly in Icelandic manuscripts, and which in early modern times inspired the composition of narrative poems and chapbooks in Denmark, Iceland and Norway, chiefly of the Tristan legend. The importation of Arthurian literature in the North, primarily French romances and lais, is indebted largely to the efforts of King Hákon Hákonarson (r. 1217–63) of Norway, who commissioned the translation of Thomas de Bretagne’s Tristan in 1226, and subsequently several Arthurian romances by Chrétien de Troyes and a number of Breton lais. The translations are unique in that the French metrical narratives were rendered in prose, the traditional form of narrative in the North. The book concludes with a chapter on Arthurian literature in the Rus’ area, precisely East Slavic, with a focus on the Belarusian Trysčan. Contents 1. The Introduction of the Arthurian Legend in Scandinavia, Marianne E. Kalinke 2. Sources, Translations, Redactions, Manuscript Transmission, Marianne E. Kalinke 3. Breta sögur and Merlínússpá, Stefanie Gropper 4 The Tristan Legend, Geraldine Barnes 5. The Translated Lais, Carolyne Larrington 6 The Old Norse-Icelandic Transmission of Chrétien de Troyes’s Romances: Ívens saga, Erex saga, Parcevals saga with Valvens þáttr, Claudia Bornholdt 7. The Old Swedish Hærra Ivan Leons riddare, William Layher 8. Arthurian Echoes in Indigenous Icelandic Sagas, Marianne E. Kalinke 9. Arthurian Ballads, rímur, Chapbooks and Folktales, M. J. Driscoll 10. Arthurian Literature in East Slavic, Susana Torres Prieto

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Crime Fiction in German is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive overview of German-language crime fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to its vibrant growth in the new millennium. As well as introducing readers to crime fiction from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the former East Germany, the volume expands the notion of a German crime-writing tradition by investigating Nazi crime fiction, Jewish-German crime fiction, Turkish-German crime fiction and the Afrika-Krimi. Other key areas, including the West German social crime novel, women’s crime writing, regional crime fiction, historical crime fiction and the Fernsehkrimi (TV crime drama) are also explored, highlighting the genre’s distinctive features in German-language contexts. The volume includes a map of German-speaking Europe, a chronology of crime publishing milestones, extracts from primary texts, and an annotated bibliography of print and online resources in English and German. Contents Map of German-speaking areas in Europe Crime Fiction in German Chronology 1. Crime Fiction in German: Key Concepts, Developments and Trends, Katharina Hall: Der Krimi; The pioneers (1828–1933); Crime fiction under National Socialism (1933–45); Post-war crime narratives (1945–59) and East German crime fiction (1949–70); The West German Soziokrimi (1960–) and further East German crime fiction (1971–89); Turkish-German crime fiction and the Frauenkrimi (1980–); Historical crime fiction, regional crime fiction and the rise of the Afrika-Krimi (1989–); Crime fiction of the new millennium and the lacuna of Jewish-German crime fiction (available Open Access at Swansea University) 2. The Emergence of Crime Fiction in German: An Early Maturity, Mary Tannert 3. Austrian Crime Fiction: Experimentation, Critical Memory and Humour, Marieke Krajenbrink 4. Swiss Crime Fiction: Loosli, Glauser, Dürrenmatt and Beyond, Martin Rosenstock 5. Der Afrika-Krimi: German Crime Fiction in Africa, Julia Augart 6. Der Frauenkrimi: Women's Crime Writing in German, Faye Stewart 7. Historical Crime Fiction in German: The Turbulent Twentieth Century, Katharina Hall 8. Der Fernsehkrimi: A Short History of Television Crime Drama in German, Katharina Hall Annotated Bibliography of Resources on German-language Crime Fiction, Katharina Hall ‘Katharina Hall’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for crime fiction in translation is prodigious, but (crucially) it is matched by her nonpareil analytic skills. This combination, when focused on her particular speciality of genre fiction from Germany, makes her the perfect editor for and contributor to Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi. The book becomes at a stroke the definitive modern guide to the subject – scholarly, lively and accessible.’ Barry Forshaw, author of Euro Noir and Nordic Noir

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Crime Fiction in German is the first volume in English to offer a comprehensive overview of German-language crime fiction from its origins in the early nineteenth century to its vibrant growth in the new millennium. As well as introducing readers to crime fiction from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the former East Germany, the volume expands the notion of a German crime-writing tradition by investigating Nazi crime fiction, Jewish-German crime fiction, Turkish-German crime fiction and the Afrika-Krimi. Other key areas, including the West German social crime novel, women’s crime writing, regional crime fiction, historical crime fiction and the Fernsehkrimi (TV crime drama) are also explored, highlighting the genre’s distinctive features in German-language contexts. The volume includes a map of German-speaking Europe, a chronology of crime publishing milestones, extracts from primary texts, and an annotated bibliography of print and online resources in English and German. Contents Map of German-speaking areas in Europe Crime Fiction in German Chronology 1. Crime Fiction in German: Key Concepts, Developments and Trends, Katharina Hall: Der Krimi; The pioneers (1828–1933); Crime fiction under National Socialism (1933–45); Post-war crime narratives (1945–59) and East German crime fiction (1949–70); The West German Soziokrimi (1960–) and further East German crime fiction (1971–89); Turkish-German crime fiction and the Frauenkrimi (1980–); Historical crime fiction, regional crime fiction and the rise of the Afrika-Krimi (1989–); Crime fiction of the new millennium and the lacuna of Jewish-German crime fiction (available Open Access at Swansea University) 2. The Emergence of Crime Fiction in German: An Early Maturity, Mary Tannert 3. Austrian Crime Fiction: Experimentation, Critical Memory and Humour, Marieke Krajenbrink 4. Swiss Crime Fiction: Loosli, Glauser, Dürrenmatt and Beyond, Martin Rosenstock 5. Der Afrika-Krimi: German Crime Fiction in Africa, Julia Augart 6. Der Frauenkrimi: Women's Crime Writing in German, Faye Stewart 7. Historical Crime Fiction in German: The Turbulent Twentieth Century, Katharina Hall 8. Der Fernsehkrimi: A Short History of Television Crime Drama in German, Katharina Hall Annotated Bibliography of Resources on German-language Crime Fiction, Katharina Hall ‘Katharina Hall’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for crime fiction in translation is prodigious, but (crucially) it is matched by her nonpareil analytic skills. This combination, when focused on her particular speciality of genre fiction from Germany, makes her the perfect editor for and contributor to Crime Fiction in German: Der Krimi. The book becomes at a stroke the definitive modern guide to the subject – scholarly, lively and accessible.’ Barry Forshaw, author of Euro Noir and Nordic Noir

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Mathematics, like language, is a universal experience. Every society counts and is empowered by its ability to count and to measure. The mathematical processes developed within various cultures differ widely, and Count Us In explores these cultural links, drawing examples from the author’s personal experiences. The process of counting, like the process of communicating with words, is common to all societies worldwide but, just as there is a rich variety of languages, so too is there a rich variety in methods of counting and of recording numbers – methods that have developed over centuries to meet the needs of various groups of people. The narrative of this book takes the form of a collection of short stories based on the author’s personal experience, linked together by a number of sub-themes. As a popular book on mathematics and on the personalities who created that mathematics, there are no prerequisites beyond the reader’s rudimentary and possibly hazy recollection of primary-school mathematics and a curiosity to know more.

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By examining the pictorial episodes in the Spanish baroque novella, this book elucidates how writers create pictorial texts, how audiences visualise their words, what consequences they exert on cognition and what actions this process inspires. To interrogate characters’ mental activity, internalisation of text and the effects on memory, this book applies methodologies from cognitive cultural studies, Classical memory treatises and techniques of spiritual visualisation. It breaks new ground by investigating how artistic genres and material culture help us grasp the audience’s aural, material, visual and textual literacies, which equipped the public with cognitive mechanisms to face restrictions in post-Counter-Reformation Spain. The writers examined include prominent representatives of Spanish prose —Cervantes, Lope de Vega, María de Zayas and Luis Vélez de Guevara— as well as Alonso de Castillo Solórzano, Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses and an anonymous group in Córdoba.

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‘Richard Marsh’ (Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) was a bestselling, versatile and prolific author of gothic, crime, adventure, romantic and comic fiction. This book, the first on Marsh, establishes his credentials as a significant agent within the fin de siècle gothic revival. Marsh’s work spans a range of gothic modes, including the canonical fin de siècle subgenres of urban and imperial gothic and gothic-inflected sensation and supernatural fiction, but also rarer hybrid genres such as the comic gothic and the occult romance. His greatest success came in 1897 when he published his bestselling invasion narrative The Beetle: A Mystery, a novel that articulated many of the key themes of fin de siècle urban gothic and outsold its close rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. The present work extends studies of Marsh’s literary production beyond The Beetle, contending that, in addition to his undoubted interest in non-normative gender and ethnic identities, Marsh was a writer with an acute sense of spatiality, whose fiction can be read productively through the lens of spatial theory.

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This is the story of the life, professional achievements and personal background, challenges and achievements of Wales’s leading historian. During his long career, Kenneth O. Morgan has been a prolific writer and, through his pioneering work, has become a leading authority on Welsh History, British History and Labour History. This autobiography also details Morgan’s often entertaining and unconventional personal experiences, and the eminent people he has met along the way – from his work in television, radio and the press as election commentator and book reviewer, to his involvement in the Labour Party from the late 1950s onwards and the close relations he developed with such Labour leaders as James Callaghan, Michael Foot, Douglas Jay and Neil Kinnock. In addition to being a respected author, Morgan has held the position of University Vice-Chancellor in Wales, is an active Labour peer, and continues to lecture at universities around the world – all achieved while juggling his life as a husband and father. In this revealing memoir, published in the year of his eightieth birthday, Morgan reflects on marriage and bereavement, on re-marriage, parenthood, friendship, religion and morality, his reactions to the historical changes he has witnessed, from attending a village school in rural Wales and wartime air-raids, through school in Hampstead and study in Oxford University and in Wales, down to entry into the House of Lords. Despite past traumas, this memoir still conveys invigoratingly a senior scholar’s idealism, abiding sense of optimism and belief in progress. Contents. List of Illustrations Foreword Chapter 1 A Divided Consciousness Chapter 2 Education, Education, Education Chapter 3 History-Making: A Welsh Historian Chapter 4 History-Making: A British Historian Chapter 5 History-Making; A Labour Historian Chapter 6 History-Making: A Contemporary Historian Chapter 7: History-Making: A Biographer Chapter 8: Experiences: The House of Lords Chapter 9: Experiences: Travelling Chapter 10: Experiences: Old and New Labour Chapter 11 My History

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This book explores the ways in which television has engaged directly and indirectly with the new realities of the post-9/11 world. It offers detailed analysis of a number of key programmes and series that engage with, or are haunted by, the aftermath of the events of September 11 in the USA and what is unavoidably through problematically and contentiously referred to as the resulting ‘war on terror’. The substantive part of the book is a series of independent chapters, each written on a different topic and considering different programmes. It includes series and single dramas representing the invasion of Iraq (The Mark of Cain, Occupation and Generation Kill), comedic representations (Gary, Tank Commander), documentary (the BBC Panorama’s coverage of 9/11), ‘what if’ docudramas (Dirty War), 9/11 in popular series (CSI:NY) and representations of Tony Blair in drama and docudrama. The book concludes with an extended reflection on contemporary docudrama and an interview with filmmaker and docudramatist Peter Kosminsky.

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In Wales Unchained Daniel G. Williams explores how Welsh writers, politicians and intellectuals have defined themselves – and have been defined by others – since the early twentieth century. Whether by exploring ideas of race in the 1930s or reflecting on the metaphoric uses of boxing, asking what it means to inhabit the ‘American century’ or probing the linguistic bases of cultural identity, Williams writes with a rare blend of theoretical sophistication and accessible clarity. This book discusses Rhys Davies in relation to D. H. Lawrence, explores the simultaneous impact that Dylan Thomas and saxophonist Charlie Parker had on the Beat Generation in 1950s America, and juxtaposes the uses made of class and ethnicity in the thought of Aneurin Bevan and Paul Robeson. Transatlantic in scope and comparative in method, this book will engage readers interested in literature, politics, history and contemporary cultural debate.

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Abbeys and Priories of Medieval Wales is the first comprehensive, illustrated guide to the religious houses of Wales from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. It offers a thorough introduction to the history of the monastic orders in Wales (the Benedictines, Cluniacs, Augustinians, Premonstratensians, Cistercians, the military orders and the friars), and to life inside medieval Welsh monasteries and nunneries, in addition to providing the histories of almost sixty communities of religious men and women, with descriptions of the standing remains of their buildings. As well as a being a scholarly book, a number of maps, ground plans and practical information make this an indispensable guide for visitors to Wales’s monastic heritage.

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American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature analyses the influence of British Gothic novels and historical romances on American art and architecture in the Romantic era. American artists and architects were among the most avid readers of Gothic fiction, which in turn informed their artistic output. In a period of increasing nationalism, the Gothic Revival architectural style in particular served to legitimise the American landscape with the materiality of European culture. At the core of this book is an analysis of American architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an understudied era. Key figures include Thomas Jefferson, Washington Allston, Alexander Jackson Davis, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Edwin Forrest, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne articulated the subject of this book when he wrote that he could understand Sir Walter Scott's romances better after viewing Scott's Gothic Revival house Abbotsford, and he understood the house better for having read the romances. From the very beginning, the Gothic Revival has been a phenomenon that crosses modern disciplinary boundaries.The groundwork in Gothic literary scholarship allows us to move beyond literature to examine how the Gothic seeps into other forms of artistic creation. This interdisciplinary book investigates the symbiotic relationship between the arts and Gothic literature to reveal new interpretative possibilities.

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This is an engaging, best-selling volume reproduced with text panels that provide brief biographies of historical figures and descriptions of major historical sites in Wales. As the only concise history of Wales currently available in print, this book is an ideal introductory study for the general reader. From primitive Stone Age cave-dwellers who were the earliest recorded inhabitants of Wales, through settlement by the Celts before the Roman and Norman invasions, this book leads the reader through the age of the native Welsh princes that culminated with the eventual conquest of Wales by Edward I in 1282. Later seminal themes include the passage of the so-called Union legislations of 1536 and 1543, the impact of successive religious changes, the agrarian and industrial revolutions, and the severe interwar depression of the twentieth century. This new edition concludes with a discussion of the far-reaching political, social and economic changes covering the momentous period from the close of the twentieth century to the present day.

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This is an authoritative and thorough analysis of the fortunes of the Welsh language in the most tumultuous period of its history. Twenty-one chapters discuss not only the numerical and territorial decline of Welsh but also its struggle for official recognition and its role in a wide variety of social domains. Of all the memorable phrases coined in the twentieth century, none has had greater resonance for the Welsh speaker than ‘Tynged yr Iaith’ (The Fate of the Language), and this volume provides a stimulating commentary on the processes of linguistic change, decay and revival experienced by the oldest spoken language in Britain. The fruit of the second major research project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies of the University of Wales, this volume will interest and intrigue the general public as well as specialists in the field and help readers to familiarize themselves with the history of a language which, over the centuries, has been an integral part of the everyday life of the Welsh people and their sense of nationhood.

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The Second Edition of Hegel and Marx After the Fall of Communism surveys Hegel’s close connection with world-famed economist Friedrich List, the declared enemy of Karl Marx. Illuminating the mysterious nature of Hegel’s relationship with Marx and Friedrich List may help us to comprehend the extraordinary geopolitical transformations that have occurred in the last 15 years since the original publication in 1998. The Afterword to this Edition looks at Russia’s revival as a world power under Vladimir Putin, and China’s ambitious economic development efforts that bring to mind Sun Yat-sen’s vision of The International Development of China.

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The Chartist movement is a core area of study in many history syllabuses. This new edition of a book first published in 1999, details the last of the Chartist insurrections in 1839. It looks at the full story of the rising, its origins and its aftermath, and analyzes the profound impact of armed insurrection on the social and political climate of the period. When the people of the coalfield took up the banner of Chartism, that movement became a political crusade. The text reveals that several revolutionary schemes were considered in the valleys, and establishes links with militants in other parts of Britain. It considers the response of the government and propertied classes - from the Special Commission that condemned three of the leaders to death, to the new interest in paternalism and the political concessions that were designed to prevent its recurrence. The author concludes that contemporaries were right to regard the rising as one of the most important turning points in Welsh and British social history.

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Demonstrating the timely relevance of Theodore Dreiser, Edith Wharton, Jack London and Henry Adams, this book shows how debates about evolution, identity, and a shifting world picture have uncanny parallels with the emerging global systems that shape our own lives. Tracing these systems' take-off point in the early twentieth century through the lens of popular science journalism, John Bruni makes a valuable contribution to the study of how biopolitical control over life created boundaries among races, classes, genders and species. Rather than accept that these writers get their scientific ideas about evolution second-hand, filtered through a social Darwinist ideology, this study argues that they actively determine what evolution means. Furthermore, the book, examines the ecological concerns that naturalist narratives reflect - such as land and water use, waste management, and environmental pollution - previously unaddressed in a book-length study.

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Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, was the only woman to take an active and independent part in the Methodist Revival of the 18th century. She was converted in 1739, at the age of 32, and became a close friend of Charles Wesley - a friendship which continued despite her conversion to Calvinistic Methodism in 1748. During the last 23 years of her life, she founded a college for training evangelical ministers, supported an orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, encouraged the building of Calvinistic Methodist chapels in England and Wales, and established her own denomination. Based on extensive original manuscript sources, including letters and papers, Welch traces Selina's story from a genteel but impoverished upbringing and the separation of her parents, her love-match with Lord Huntingdon, her long widowhood during which she managed the family estates, her clashes with John Wesley, through to the culmination of her work for the Methodists and the conclusion of her pilgrimage towards spiritual fulfilment.

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The book focuses on the Jewish communities in Cardiff, Swansea and the South Wales valleys in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, looking at their everyday lives and also more dramatic and sensational events such as the Tredegar Riots in 1911 and the “Jewess Abduction Case” of 1867-8. A new introduction by Paul O’Leary considers scholarship on the subject which has been published since the book was first published and also discusses the polarised views about the Tredegar Riots of 1911: were the riots the result of ant-semitism, or was South Wales a philosemitic place, where the Welsh and Jewish communities had much in common?

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In the present era of warring and debate relating to Britain's intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, this volume highlights how contemporary are the arguments of Henry Richard in the 19th century, and how progressive were his efforts for Wales, for education and for the Welsh language.

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The Art of the Text contributes to the fast-developing dialogue between textual studies and visual culture studies. It focuses on the processes through which writers think and readers respond visually and, in essays by researchers in literature, screen and visual studies, the volume explores the visuality of the literary and non-literary text, with a sustained focus on French material of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Visuality is appraised here not as a state, but as a set of processes of adaptation, resistance, negotiation, and transformation. By reading visually, the contributors here reactivate the visual-textual relations of canonical texts - from Romanticism to Naturalism, Surrealism to high Modernism; from film to fan literature, television to picture language.

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Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies offers a revelatory re-reading of Edward Thomas. Adapting Pascale Casanova's vision of 'world literature' as a system of competing national traditions, this study analyses Thomas's appropriation of Anglocentric British literary culture at key moments of historical crisis in the twentieth century: after the First World War, either side of the Second World War, and with the resumption of war in Ireland in the 1970s. It shows how the dominant assumptions underpinning the discipline of English Literature marginalise the Welshness of Thomas's work, before combining this revised 'world literature' model with fresh archival research to reveal how Thomas's reading of Welsh culture - its barddas, folk and literary traditions - is central both to his creation of an innovative body of poetry and to his extensive, and relatively neglected, prose. This study is groundbreaking in its contribution to recent debates about devolution and independence for Britain's constituent nations.

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The study places the work of a major religious poet of the late twentieth century in a number of striking new perspectives that allow him to be viewed for the first time as an 'alternative' war poet, a conscience-stricken pacifist, a jealously opportunistic student of art, and an experimental biographer of the modern soul. Published to mark the centenary of the ‘ogre of Wales’, this volume deals with the idées fixes that serially possessed the fiercely intense imagination of R. S. Thomas: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family and, of course, a vexingly elusive deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring Thomas’s poetry into startling new relief. The war poetry is considered alongside the poet’s early relationship to the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of the poetry’s concerns; the intriguing ‘secret code’ of some of Thomas’s Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are brought centre-stage from the peripheries to which they have been routinely relegated.

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A paperback edition of a scholarly edition of a complex Arthurian myth, together with a comprehensive introduction, explanatory notes and detailed glossary. First published in 1948.

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Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cŵn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches. Contents Prologue: ‘A Long Terror’ PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY 1. Cambria Gothica (1780s–1820s) 2. An Underworld of One’s Own (1830s–1900s). 3. Haunted Communities (1900s–1940s). 4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s–1997). PART II: ‘THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT’ 5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn. 6. The Sin-eater Epilogue: Post-devolution Gothic Notes Select Bibliography Index

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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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In examining a number of francophone Montreal novels from 1960 to 2005, this interdisciplinary study considers the ways in which these connect with material landscapes to produce a city of neighbourhoods. In so doing, it reflects on how Montreal has been seen as both home and not home for francophone Quebecers. Morgan offers an overview of the fiction; examines micro and macro geographies of Montreal, and identifies some key literary trends. In so doing, it reflects on the importance of the imaginary in our experiencing and understanding of the urban.

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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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Medieval anchorites willingly embraced the most extreme form of solitude known to the medieval world, so they might forge a closer connection with God. Yet to be physically enclosed within the same four walls for life required strength far beyond most medieval Christians. This book explores the English anchoritic guides which were written, revised and translated, throughout the Middle Ages, to enable recluses to come to terms with the enormity of their choices. The book explores five centuries of the guides' negotiations of four anchoritic ideals: enclosure, solitude, chastity and orthodoxy, and of two vital anchoritic spiritual practices: asceticism and contemplative experience. It explodes the myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, revealing it as the site of potential intellectual exchange and spiritual growth.

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This is the first full-length study of Swansea's urban development from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century. It tells the little known story of how Swansea gained an unrivalled position of influence as an urban centre, which led it briefly to claim to be the 'metropolis of Wales', and how it then lost this status in the face of rapid urban development elsewhere in Wales. As such it provides an important new perspective on Welsh urban history in which the role of Cardiff, Merthyr Tydfil and even Bristol are better known as towns of influence in Welsh urban life. It also offers an analysis of how Swansea's experience of urbanisation fits into the wider picture of British urban history.

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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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Welsh Ballads of the French Revolution provides for the first time an edition, with parallel English translations, of Welsh-language ballads composed in reaction to the momentous events of the Revolution in France and the two decades of war which followed. Ballad writers were first spurred to respond in 1793, when the French monarchs were executed, France declared war upon Britain, and paranoia regarding the possible threat of internal revolt in Britain reached a crisis point. As the decade proceeded, ballads were sung in thanks for the victory of British forces and local people against an invasion of Pembrokeshire by French troops, and in reaction to key naval battles and to the extensive mobilization of militia and volunteer forces. Scholars working on the British response to the Revolution have showed increasing interest in exploring the contents of ballads and songs. The ballad in particular is seen as a vital source of information, since it represents ordinary people's awareness of the developments of the period. Balladry is also subject to continued research within Welsh scholarship, and this volume, with its focus on a clearly defined historical period and its revelation of new voices within the canon of Welsh ballad writers, will drive this field of study forwards. Regional reactions to the Revolution within the British Isles are also now seen as crucially important, but Wales, partly because of the inaccessibility of material composed in the Welsh language, has repeatedly been omitted from the general picture. This volume aids in rectifying this situation, ensuring (by use of translation, copious contextualizing notes, and a lengthy introduction) that both the ballad genre and Welsh reactions receive the attention they deserve from the wider scholarly community.

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The Films of Elias Querejeta: A Producer of Landscapes is the first book in English to explore the career of Spain's most important producer. Through their recurring emphasis on landscape, his films have consistently documented a country in the grip of modernization from the 1960s to the present day. In particular, this book investigates the ways in which landscape in his productions can be understood as a site of political struggle against Francoism and Spain's embrace of neoliberal capitalism. In bringing together both the importance of cinematic and spatial production, the twin focus of this book intends not only to make an original contribution to Film Studies, but also to Spanish Cultural Studies and Cultural Geography

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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 past three decades have witnessed the emergence of several Kantian theories. Both the critical reaction to consequentialism inspired by Rawlsian constructivism and the universalism of more recent theories informed by Habermasian discourse ethics trace their main sources of inspiration back to Kant's writings.

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This fourth volume in the county history of Gwent/Monmouthshire deals with the explosion of industrial development from 1780 to the eve of the First World War, and as such is first authoritative treatment of the transformation of south-east Wales into a centre of the iron and coal industry.

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This book will be the first to focus specifically on the exile-poetry link in the case of Argentina since the 1950s. Throughout Argentina's history, authors and important political figures have lived and written in exile. Thus exile is both a vital theme and a practical condition for Argentine letters, yet conversely, contemporary Argentina is a nation of immigrants from Europe and the rest of Latin America. Poetry is often perceived as the least directly political of genres, yet political and other forms of exile have impinged equally on the lives of poets as on any group. This study concentrates on writers who both regarded themselves as in some way exiled and who wrote about exile. This selection includes poets who are influential and recognised, but in general have not enjoyed the detailed study that they deserve: Alejandra Pizarnik, Juan Gelman, Osvaldo Lamborghini, Nestor Perlongher, Sergio Raimondi, Cristian Aliaga, and Washington Cucurto.

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Crime writers from the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have become some of the most widely read authors of the 1990s and 2000s. Yet books by such authors as Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Karin Fossum, and Anne Holt have also tantalized readers, because many of them do not know the cultures of the Nordic countries. As the first study in English of Nordic crime fiction, "Scandinavian Crime Fiction" spells out the context into which Nordic crime fiction fits through thirteen articles on the history, aesthetics, and film and television adaptation of Nordic crime fiction.

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Iberian Crime Fiction is the first volume in English to provide an extensive overview of crime fiction in Spain and Portugal. While the origins of peninsular crime fiction are traced in Nancy Vosburg's introductory chapter to the volume, the essays focus on specific topics that provide readers with a sense of the development of the genre in the second half of the 20th-century and current trends in the 21st-century. Patty Hart, whose The Spanish Sleuth introduced English-speaking readers to early crime fiction in Spain, provides a summary account of the development of the crime novel from the 1950s through the 1980s, highlighting the major authors and works that set the stage for the boom that followed the establishment of the novela negra tradition in the 1970s. This tradition, spearheaded by Manuel Vazquez Montalban, is the subject of a separate essay by Maria Balibrea that analyzes the socio-political conditions that gave rise to the novela negra. NancyVosburg studies the emergence of a feminine/feminist crime novel in the 1980s and 1990s and the subversion of masculine codes associated with crime fiction, while Stewart King analyzes crime fiction from the Catalan, Basque, and Galician autonomous regions of Spain, focusing on the political realities that resulted in a different use of the genre as a vehicle of regional nationalism. David Knutson traces contemporary trends in Spanish crime fiction, beginning in the 1990s and up to the present. Paul Castro's essay documents the emergence of crime fiction in Portugal and the major works/authors through to the present.

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Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1660 and 1850. It casts light on episodes such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in 19th-century Cuba.

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