Search results for ""University of Wales Press""

Mary Shelley reappraises the significance of Frankenstein alongside other works by Shelley which could be considered to revise the significance and fluctuating meanings of `Gothic' during the Romantic period. It offers scholarly, fresh readings of the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein, as well as chapters upon the fiction that Shelley composed in between both editions, and during the same decade as its second edition. In its broader examination of Mary Shelley's work, this study is the first of its kind within the field of Gothic studies. Alongside sustained explorations of Frankenstein, Matilda, Valperga and The Last Man, the volume Mary Shelley reappraises some of the shorter essays and tales that the author composed for contemporary magazines. Angela Wright argues that the time is now right for a re-examination of the extent to which Shelley participated in and redirected the Gothic tradition.

Read more less

"Selections from Ystorya Bown o Hamtwn" provides edited selections, together with an introduction, notes, and glossary, from a long and entertaining thirteenth century Welsh text which belongs to the genre of medieval translations. The source of "Ystorya Bown" is the "Anglo-Norman Geste de Boeve de Haumtone". This was a very popular tale in the Middle Ages and was translated not only into Welsh, but also into Middle English and Old Norse, and, via an English intermediary, into Early Modern Irish. This story allows fascinating insights into the heroic Christian mentality and world view of its audiences.

Read more less

This is a study of the lower orders within Welsh rural communities and pays attention to those people who worked and lived off the land of 18th century Wales, often amidst grinding poverty and insecurity.

Read more less

Christoph Hein is widely regarded as one of the most important writers to emerge from the former GDR. This volume contains an interview with Hein, a previously unpublished prose piece by him, an up-to-date biography and critical articles which examine individual texts in detail.

Read more less

This work argues that the heritage of Wales is being exploited and cheapened by the creation of tourist "experiences" which trade on nostalgia. It calls for integrity and authenticity in the interpretation of Welsh heritage, emphasizing the need for careful selection of sites and artefacts. The text is essentially a survey from which implications not only for the development of museums and interpretative centres in Wales but also for other parts of the United Kingdom. It should be of interest to all those who work in the "heritage industry", to their public and to anyone concernbed about the way in which the past is being presented.

Read more less

Rachel Bromwich's magisterial edition of Trioedd Ynys Prydein has long won its place as a classic of Celtic studies. This revised edition shows the author's continued mastery of the subject, including a new preface by Morfydd Owen, and will be essential reading for Celticists and for those interested in early British history and literature and in Arthurian studies. Early Welsh literature shows a predilection for classifying names, facts and precepts into triple groups, or triads. The Triads of the Isle of Britain form a series of texts which commemorate the names of traditional heroes and heroines, and which would have served as a catalogue of the names of these heroic figures. The names are grouped under various imprecise but complimentary epithets, which are often paralleled in the esoteric language of the medieval bards, who would have used the triads as an index of past history and legend. This edition is based on a full collation of the most important manuscripts, the earliest of which go back to the thirteenth century. The Welsh text is accompanied by English translations of each triad and extensive notes, and the volume includes four appendices, which are also an important source of personal names. The Introduction to the volume discusses the significance of Trioedd Ynys Prydein in the history of Welsh literature, and examines the traditional basis of the triads.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Works which have sought to look specifically at the Welsh in Australia have been few in number and characterised by a concentration on prominent individuals and cultural/religious societies, thus excluding many facets of immigrant life. This book provides an analysis of the Welsh immigrant community in the Ballarat/Sebastopol gold mining district of Victoria, Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century and considers all aspects of the Welsh immigrant experience. As its focus, the book has the Welsh migrant group as a whole, in one particular area, during one period of time, for ultimately it was the migrants themselves who were responsible for the strength or weakness of Welsh religious life, the success or failure of Welsh cultural institutions; they who decided whether or not to retain and transmit their national language if, indeed, they spoke it in the first place; they who chose whether or not to marry within their own group, to live amongst their own, to retain the ties of Welshness and pass on the values of the Old Country, or to attempt full and immediate integration; they who were miners or shop owners, abstainers or drunkards, law abiding or criminal. A true picture of Welsh immigrant life can only be obtained by considering the community in its entirety, to view it in the round, as it were. This work attempts to do just that and hopes to make some small contribution to the understanding of what it was to be one amongst the thousands of Welsh people who lived in a particular place at a certain time in a land so far from Wales.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.)

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

This book tells the dramatic and often surprising story of the learning of the Irish language by Irish Republican prisoners held in the infamous H-block cells during the bloody political conflict in Northern Ireland. Using research methods and techniques, the author closely analyses the emergence of the Irish language amongst republican prisoners and ex prisoners in Northern Ireland from the 1970s up until the present. This pioneering study shows how the language was used exclusively in parts of the prison, despite the efforts of the prison authorities to suppress the language, and the dramatic impact this had on Irish society. Drawing on interviews with the prisoners, and various other materials, Mac Giolla Chriost shows how these developments gave rise to the popular coinage of the term ‘Jailtacht’, a deformation of ‘Gaeltacht’ - the official Irish-speaking districts of the Republic of Ireland, to describe this unique linguistic phenomenon.

Read more less

The Newport Medieval Ship is the most important late-medieval merchant vessel yet recovered. Built c.1450 in northern Spain, it foundered at Newport twenty years later while undergoing repairs. Since its discovery in 2002, further investigations have transformed historians’ understanding of fifteenth-century ship technology. With plans in place to make the ship the centrepiece for a permanent exhibition in Newport, this volume interprets the vessel, to enable visitors, students and researchers to understand the ship and the world from which it came. The volume contains eleven chapters, written by leading maritime archaeologists and historians. Together, they consider its significance and locate the vessel within its commercial, political and social environment.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

The fantastic has been and is particularly prolific in Hispanic countries during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, largely due to the legacy of short story writers as well as the Latin-American boom that presented alternatives to the model of literary realism. While these writers' works have done much to establish the Hispanic fantastic in the international literary canon, women authors from Spain and Latin America are not always acknowledged, and their work is less well known to readers. The aim of this critical anthology is to render Hispanic female writers of the fantastic visible, to publish a representative selection of their work, and to make it accessible to English-speaking readers. Five short stories are presented by five key authors. They attest to the richness and diversity of fantastic fiction in the Spanish language, and extend from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century, covering a range of nationalities, cultural references and language specificities from Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Argentina.

Read more less

At his death in 2000, R.S. Thomas was widely considered to be one of the major poets of the English-speaking world, having been nominated for the Nobel prize for Literature. With Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas is probably Wales' best-known poet internationally. Tony Brown provides an introduction to R.S. Thomas' life and work, as well as new perspectives and insights for those already familiar with the poetry. His approach is broadly chronological, interweaving life and work in order to evaluate Thomas' poetic achievement. In addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas' poetry, and its movements over time between personal, spiritual and political concerns, Tony Brown also examines Thomas' contribution to the culture of Wales, not just in his writing but also his political interventions and activism on behalf of Welsh language and culture.

Read more less

Cardiff has a long and momentous maritime history. This richly researched volume delves into the maritime past of Cardiff and Penarth, providing a comprehensive account from the first stirrings of seaborne trade and the cargoes of wool, hides and butter, to the ever-present threat of piracy, and from the rapid development linked to the export of iron and the later trade in coal, to the changes wrought by the effects of the two world wars, and the developments in types of vessels over the years. This beautifully illustrated history will appeal to local historians and shipping enthusiasts around the world. John Richards has an MA from Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of Wales. He has previously written two books: Wales on the Western Front for University of Wales Press, and a history of Cotrell Park, Vale of Glamorgan.

Read more less