Search results for ""University of Wales Press""

This book surveys the economy of Wales from the first Norman intrusions of 1067 to the Act of Union of England and Wales in 1536. Key themes include the evolution of the agrarian economy; the foundation and growth of towns; the adoption of a money economy; English colonization and economic exploitation; the collapse of Welsh social structures and rise of economic individualism; the disastrous effect of the Glyndwr rebellion; and, ultimately, the alignment of the Welsh economy to the English economy. Comprising four chapters, a narrative history is presented of the economic history of Wales, 1067-1536, and the final chapter tests the applicability in a Welsh context of the main theoretical frameworks that have been developed to explain long-term economic and social change in medieval Britain and Europe.

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Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723–91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as ‘the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us’. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, ‘the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English’. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty’s Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of ‘one of the formative minds’ of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

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Little, if anything, is known historically of Arthur, yet for centuries the romances of Arthur and his court dominated the imaginative literature of Europe in many languages. The roots of this vast flowering of the Arthurian legend are to be found in early Welsh tradition, and this volume gives an account of the Arthurian literature produced in Wales, in both Welsh and Latin, during the Middle Ages. The distinguished contributors offer a comprehensive view of recent scholarship relating to Arthurian literature in early Welsh and other Brythonic sources. The volume includes chapters on the 'historical' Arthur, Arthur in early Welsh verse, the legend of Merlin, the tales of Culhwch ac Olwen, Geraint, Owain, Peredur, The Dream of Rhonabwy and Trystan ac Esyllt. Other chapters investigate the evidence for the growth of the Arthurian theme in the Triads and in the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and discuss the Breton connection and the gradual transmission of the legend to the non-Celtic world. The volume, which is unique in offering a comprehensive discussion of the subject, will appeal widely to medievalists, to Welsh and Celtic scholars, and to those non-specialists who have felt the fascination of the figure of Arthur and wish to know more.

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Human civilisation was not just created by humans: we had the help of many creatures, and foremost among these were sheep. From Argentina to Australia and from Mesopotamia to Mongolia, just about every country with hills and meadows has adopted and then developed sheep farming as a way of living. And in Wales in particular, sheep played a central role in shaping landscape and culture. Sheeplands outlines the journeys taken by some of these sheep as they voyaged across the world, both by themselves and with human shepherds, from the earliest human settlements to the present day. Along the way, Alan Marshall paints vivid portraits of the roles sheep have played in the development of the modern world, in times of peace and war, and describes how our sheeplands might continue to influence Wales and the wider world in future years.

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In 1880, Griffith Evans, an army veterinary surgeon in India, made the seminal discovery that blood parasites then universally considered benign were pathogenic. Spurned by peers and colleagues, his conclusions from experiments with diseased horses were acknowledged by Koch and Pasteur, but it took many years before his achievement received general recognition. The son of a farmer near Tywyn, Meirionnydd, Evans was commissioned as a veterinary officer in the Royal Artillery. He was first posted to Canada where, in his spare time, he qualified in medicine. An irrepressible adventurer, he visited North America during the Civil War, meeting Abraham Lincoln and touring the Union front line.Evans's talent for engagement with people and cultures characterised his life in Canada and in India. During a long and productive retirement in north Wales, he immersed himself in local and national affairs. At his centenary in 1935, Evans received the accolades of his profession, community and fami

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No in- or out-of-print book has the same goals, content, wide range, and scholarly approach as the present study. Whether intentionally or unintentionally, previously published books have neglected ancient Graeco-Roman texts that either cause horror or may be said to belong to the horror genre. This may partly be the result of the low esteem in which any text that did not fit neatly into one of the major and traditional literary genres was held by most scholars particularly apparent with regard to texts that dealt with the supernatural or the occult, which were often relegated to specialists in ancient religions, rituals or beliefs. This book reviews the concepts of horror (literary, psychological, and biophysical), examines the current definitions for horror fiction', evaluates the current interest in the darker side of the classical world, and suggests new ways of thinking about horror as a genre.

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The works of Argentine writer Silvina Ocampo (1903–93) are enjoying unprecedented attention from international scholars, writers, journalists, translators and film directors. This book explores the reason for the growing interest, and how it connects with her transgressive representations of motherhood and childhood. By overlapping themes from past scholarship (such as childhood, gender representations, the fantastic and sexuality), new and diverse issues intersect, contradict or revise previous interpretations of Ocampo’s works and her place in Argentine letters. Specifically, the much-overlooked mother/child dyad will offer a unique vantage point for this volume, bringing to the surface disparities concerning age, gender, sexuality, knowledge, agency and voice, often ignored or minimised in theoretical frameworks and popular narratives. This focus on the spaces of motherhood and childhood maps out Ocampo’s consistent refusal to prioritise one space over another, or to legitimise one voice over another, which highlights a radical theorisation of subjectivities in flux.

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In The Foresters, Elizabeth Gunning offers an entertaining romp through the many tropes of Gothic literature, including clandestine marriages; tyrannous fathers; encounters with banditti; mysterious crypts; strange ceremonies conducted at midnight; sublime scenery; a spectre (or two); and inexplicable disembodied voices – to name but a few. Gunning employs all of these devices to create a compelling story combining the wildest elements of fiction with her own personal history and experience within eighteenth-century society, producing both a social document and an entertaining read. Considering multiple complex themes, this novel is not only an entertaining Gothic novel, but also presents some of the most pressing concerns of the day for consideration by the reader. Presented in print for the first time since 1796, the novel is accompanied here by a comprehensive introduction to the text and detailed scholarly notes.

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The Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans was the first large open-air folk museum in Britain. It was (according to himself) created by one man: Iorwerth C. Peate, poet, author, and scholar. This is the first book-length critical study of Peate as scholar and curator, written by one of his successors at St Fagans. Whereas previous commentaries have very largely relied on Peate’s own recollections and views, this book makes extensive use of Peate’s own papers and National Museum archives to inform a far more balanced view of his work, emphasising for the first time the National Museum policy context and its corporate wish to estsablish a national folk museum, and the critical role played by Peate’s boss and bête noir Sir Cyril Fox. This volume also introduces Peate’s relevant Welsh-language writings to anglophone readers.

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This is a study of tumultuous transformations of kinship and intimate relationships in American horror fiction over the last three decades. Twelve contemporary novels (by ten women writers and two whose work has been identified as women’s fiction) are grouped into four main thematic clusters – haunted houses; monsters; vampires; and hauntings – but it is social scripts and concerns linked directly to intimacy and family life that structure the entire volume. By drawing attention to how the most intimate of all social relationships – the family – supports and replicates social hierarchies, exclusions, and struggles for dominance, the book problematises the source of horror. The consideration of horror narratives through the lens of familial intimacies makes it possible to rethink genre boundaries, to question the efficacy of certain genre tropes, and to consider the contribution of such diverse authors as Kathe Koja, Tananarive Due, Gwendolyn Kiste, Elizabeth Engstrom, Sara Gran and Caitlín R. Kiernan.

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Thousands of literary, popular, non-fiction and archival texts since the eighteenth century document the human experience of the British industrial canal. This book traces networks of literary canal texts across four centuries to understand our relationships with water, with place, and with the past. In our era of climate crisis, this reading calls for a rethinking of the waterways of literature not simply as an antique transport system, but as a coal-fired energy system with implications for the present. This book demonstrates how waterways literature has always been profoundly interested in the things we dig out of the ground, and the uses to which they are put. The industrial canal never just connected parts of Britain: via its literature we read the ways in which we are in touch with previous centuries and epochs, how canals linked inland Britain to Empire, how they connected forms of labour, and people to water.

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In 2020 and 2021, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Gwrych Castle was familiar to the British public as the setting of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Lesser known is that, at the beginning of the Second World War, this once-grand country house in North Wales became home to around two hundred Jewish refugee children who had been rescued from Europe on the Kindertransport. Under trying conditions, while the families they had been separated from faced the gravest of dangers, these children and their adult guardians established a Hachshara at Gwrych Castle: a training centre intended to prepare them for the dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael), where they hoped one day to be reunited with the families they left behind. In this fascinating debut, historian Andrew Hesketh tells the story of these refugees and the community they built, shining a light on a chapter of Jewish history that deserves to be far more widely known. He recounts moving moments of friendship, respect, tension and humour as the new arrivals and local residents came to know each other, while the shadows of war loomed ever closer, and the Hachshara project found itself facing an uncertain future.

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This book is a pioneering study of Blaxploitation horror films, connecting them with both mainstream horror movies and classic Gothic texts. The author argues that conventional horror films adapt, while Blaxploitation horror films appropriate, the archetypes of Gothic fiction – and rather than exploit, it is argued that they function to satisfy Black audiences. Of the few scholars who have given consideration to Blaxploitation horror films, only occasional chapters have been devoted by them in monographs focused on either Blaxploitation films or horror films. In marked contrast, the present study gives a book-length consideration to Blaxploitation horror films per se, demonstrating how they engage both Gothic fiction and film, and issues of vital significance to American society and culture in the 1970s. In this important and innovative study, chapters explore the sociocultural significance of the vampire, Frankenstein’s monster, Jekyll/Hyde and the werewolf, the zombie and the demon.

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This book is an entertaining, informative and enchanting introduction to its subject – just as those medieval banes of the farmyard, the Fox and the Vixen, were enchanting in escapades from fables and funny tales, from beastly epic poems and bestiaries, and from medieval material culture (in Danish wall-paintings and Dutch manuscript illustrations and statues, stained-glass and Italian mosaics). There exist books on medieval fox stories and on the animal’s iconography, which are important themes in this study, but this book is the first holistic approach to all types of manifestations of foxes in medieval culture – from medical recipes and fur trade, to Bible commentaries and hunting manuals.

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Gothic tourism is a growing phenomenon and a medium through which Gothic fictions and folkloric tales are re-imagined and generated. This book examines the complex relationship between contemporary English Gothic attractions and storytelling, uncovering how works of Gothic fiction can both inspire Gothic tourism and emerge from the spaces of Gothic tourism, contending that Gothic tourist attractions are multi-layered storytelling experiences. Contributing to the study of literature and place, Gothic Literary Travel and Tourism draws together the study of literary Gothic tourism and spatial philosophy, offering interdisciplinary analysis into the interface between Gothic narrative(s) and the spaces in which the tourist navigates. The storytelling practices taking place in Gothic caves, theme parks, ghost tours and rural walks serve to reflect contemporary fears and anxieties. This book situates the act of touring a Gothic site as a process of literary and social discovery.

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Middle Eastern Gothics is the first scholarly volume on Gothic literature from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Its nine chapters consider literary expressions of the Gothic in the major Middle Eastern languages – Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish. Spanning the Maghreb, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt and Palestine, the book makes a case for the transnational region – a cohesive geographic space encompassing diverse cultures, languages and histories that parallel, intersect or overlap – as a crucial locus of Gothic Studies, alongside the nation, the globe or the hyper-local. Across the MENA region, the Gothic helps express ongoing literary negotiations with modernity, leaving its distinctive mark on representations of globalisation, colonialism and nationalism. At the same time, Middle Eastern literary texts expand the boundaries of the mode on their own terms, refracting broad histories through local and indigenous forms, figures and narratives that we might associate with the Gothic.

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The University of Wales Trinity Saint David was originally founded in 1822 as St David’s College, Lampeter. It is now the oldest higher education collegiate institution in Wales, and in its two hundred years of history has been the recipient of many fascinating and rare manuscripts, early printed books, beautifully illustrated volumes, and rare publications from broadsheets to journals. These were largely received through the generous donations of many benefactors, including the institution’s founder Bishop Thomas Burgess of St Davids, with the collection housed today in the Roderic Bowen Library on the Lampeter campus. This fully illustrated volume contains a selection from the many thousands of works spanning more than seven hundred years, with short essays by scholars whose knowledge and appreciation of the works are unrivalled, revealing the riches of what was once known as ‘the greatest little library in Wales’.

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This volume reflects on two decades of Welsh devolution, and a contributes to debate on its significance and future course. Drawing on previously unpublished interviews undertaken by the late Professor Michael Sullivan with key protagonists in Welsh devolution, and with expert analysis from leading researchers in different disciplines and fields of policy, the book examines what has been described as the emergence through devolution of a 'Welsh stripe' in social democracy. While the volume editors conclude this epithet, coined by Professor Sullivan, is apt, this collection of essays also presents a complex, multi-faceted picture of the drivers of policy, of continuity from the pre-devolution era, as well as change driven by factors within and without Wales. A mixed picture emerges, featuring variously (and in various combinations of) boldness of ambition, distinctive ideological positioning, homegrown priority-setting, the frustrations of the devolution settlement, and adverse (arguably unfair) international comparisons.

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This book debates a crossover between the Gothic and the medical imagination in the Romantic period. It explores the gore and uncertainty typical of medical experimentation, and expands the possibilities of medical theories in a speculative space by a focus on Gothic novels, short stories, poetry, drama and chapbooks. By comparing the Gothic's collection of unsavoury tropes to morbid anatomy's collection of diseased organs, the author argues that the Gothic's prioritisation of fear and gore gives it access to nonnormative bodies, reallocating medical and narrative agency to bodies considered otherwise powerless. Each chapter pairs a trope with a critical medical debate, granting silenced bodies power over their own narratives: the reanimated corpse confronts fears about vitalism; the skeleton exposes fears about pain; the unreliable corpse feeds on fears of dissection; the devil redirects fears about disability; the dangerous narrative manipulates fears of contagion and vaccination.

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Women's Lives presents essays on the ways in which the lives and voices of women permeated medieval literature and culture. The ubiquity of women amongst the medieval canon provides an opportunity for considering a different sphere of medieval culture and power that is frequently not given the attention it requires. The reception and use of female figures from this period has proven influential as subjects in literary, political, and social writings; the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression, and their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them. The volume includes essays on well-known medieval women, such as Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Cartagena, as well as women less-known to scholars of the European Middle Ages, such as Al-K?hina and Liang Hongyu. Each essay is directly related to the work of Elizabeth Petroff, a scholar of Medieval Women Mystics who helped recover texts written by medieval women.

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The book subjects male characters in six south Wales novels written between 1936 and 2014 to detailed, gendered reading. It argues that the novels critique the form of masculine hegemony propagated by structural patriarchy serving the material demands of industrial capitalism. Each depicts characters confined to a limited repertoire of culturally endorsed behaviourial norms – such as displays of power, decisiveness and self-control – which prohibit the expression and cultivation of the subjective self. Within the social organisation of industrial capitalism, the working-class characters are, in practice, reduced to dispensable functionaries at work while, in theory, they are accorded the status of patriarchally-sanctioned principals at home. Ideologically subservient and ‘feminised’ in one context, they are ideologically dominant and ‘masculinised’ in another. As they negotiate, resist or strive to reconcile the irreconcilable demands of such gendered practices, recurring patterns of exclusion, inadequacy and mental instability are made evident in their representation.

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Living Off-grid in Wales examines the new policy context for off-grid rural development by contrasting the policy approach with the activist version of going off-grid. The examples examined in the book feed into much broader debates about the possibility of planning for sustainable development. This book brings clarity to the notion of off-grid by examining two main case studies (supplemented by other ethnographic data) that do off-grid very differently to each other. The policy context that is examined in the book is distinctive to Wales - it is novel to see a planning policy that not only incorporates, but insists on off-grid. The book pivots on this contradiction: if planning (as is thought) is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from these systems? The ethnographic case studies also comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the book's focus on alternative communities brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a new form of radical social assemblage.

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Mae Cyfri’n Cewri yn dathlu bywyd a gwaith mathemategwyr a gysylltir â Chymru. Pan gyfansoddwyd yr anthem genedlaethol ym 1856, roedd Cymru ym merw y Chwyldro Diwydiannol, gyda chymdeithasau gwyddonol yn codi fel madarch ar hyd a lled y wlad. Erbyn diwedd y ganrif, roedd ein dehongliad o’n diwylliant fel un sy’n cynnwys y gwyddorau yn ogystal â’r celfyddydau wedi culhau i gynnwys barddoniaeth, cerddoriaeth a chrefydd ar draul bron i bopeth arall. Yn dilyn poblogrwydd ei gyfrol Mae Pawb yn Cyfrif, mae’r awdur yma’n defnyddio’r un arddull i’n gwahodd i ymfalchïo yn ein mathemategwyr ac i ddangos sut y mae’r rhod wedi troi.

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This book presents the life and work of Professor Evan James Williams, described as one of Wales's most eminent scientists. Williams played a prominent part in the early twentieth-century revolution in physics with the emergence of quantum physics, and was an able experimentalist and brilliant theoretician who made notable contributions in atomic physics and the discovery of a new elementary particle. From humble beginnings in rural Cardiganshire, his stellar career is charted in this book as he climbed the academic ladder at a number of universities, culminating in his appointment as professor of physics at Aberystwyth and election to a fellowship of the Royal Society. During the Second World War, he was instrumental in applying operational research to thwart the threat of German submarines in the Atlantic. His career was cut short, however, by his early death in 1945.

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Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction, and its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics and cultural life at large – questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders and boundaries; erecting and dismantling new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.

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Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

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Videogames are full of horrors – and of horror, a facet of the media that has been largely overlooked by the academic community in terms of lengthy studies in the fast-growing field of videogame scholarship. This book engages with the research of prominent scholars across the humanities to explore the presence, role and function of horror in videogames, and in doing so it demonstrates how videogames enter discussion on horror and offer a unique, radical space that horror is particularly suited to fill. The topics covered include the construction of stories in videogames, the role of the monster and, of course, how death is treated as a learning tool and as a facet of horror.

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The city has traditionally been configured as a fundamentally masculine space. This collection of essays seeks to question many of the idees recues surrounding women's ongoing association with the private, the domestic and the rural. Covering a selection of films, journals and novels from the French medieval period to the Franco-Algerian present, it challenges the traditionally gendered dichotomisation of the masculine public and feminine private upon which so much of French, and European, literature and culture is predicated. Is the urban flaneur a quintessentially male phenomenon or can there exist a true flaneuse as active agent, expressing the confidence and pleasure of a woman moving freely in the urban environment? Women and the City in French Literature and Culture seeks to locate exactly where women are heading - both individually and collectively - in their relationships to the urban environment; by so doing, it nuances the conventional binaristic perception of women and the city in an endeavour to redirect future research in women's studies towards more interesting and representative urban destinations.

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This book focuses on Kant's analysis of three issues crucial for contemporary politics. Starting from a new reading of Kant's account of our innate right to freedom, it highlights how a Kantian foundation of human rights, properly understood and modified where necessary, appears more promising than the foundational arguments currently offered by philosophers. It then compares Kant's model for peace with the apparently similar model of democratic peace to show that the two are profoundly different in content and in quality. The book concludes in analysis of Kant's controversial view of history to rescue it from the idea that his belief in progress is at best over-optimistic and at worst dogmatic. Congratulations to Professor Luigi Caranti and his book 'Kant's Political Legacy' which has been given a 'honorable mention' by the North American Kant Society in the competition for the best 2018 book on Kant!! http://northamericankantsociety.onefireplace.org/Announcements/6660588

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This book reclaims for Wales the history and culture of a music that eventually emerged as jazz in the 1920s, its tendrils and roots extending back to slave songs and abolition campaign songs, and Swansea’s long-forgotten connection with Cincinnati, Ohio. The main themes of the book are to illustrate and emphasise the strong links between emerging African American music in the USA and the development of jazz in mainstream popular culture in Wales; the emancipation and contribution of Welsh women to the music and its social-cultural heritage; and an historical appraisal as the music journeyed towards the Second World War and into living memory. The jazz story is set amid the politics, socio-cultural and feminist history of the time from whence the music emerged – which begs the question ‘When Was Jazz?’ (to echo Gwyn A. Williams in 1985, who asked ‘When Was Wales?’). If jazz is described as ‘the music of protest and rebellion’, then there was certainly plenty going on during the jazz age in Wales.

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This book describes the long-term four billion-year context of anthropogenic climate change, and seeks to explain our inability to respond positively to its challenges. It argues that the availability of energy and the consequential capacity to do work and exert power has, over this time, defined the trajectory of life on planet Earth as well as many of its physiochemical characteristics. Six major historic energy revolutions are recognised - energising of the first living cell; harvesting the Sun's energy; emergence of complex eukaryotic cells; hominid use of fire/cooking for brains not brawn; agriculture, more food and urban life; fossil fuel bonanza and the industrial revolution - and we are now in the midst of the seventh revolution, responding albeit reluctantly to anthropogenic global climate change.

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Lynette Roberts is an extraordinary modernist poet and novelist, with her vivid imagery and restless experimentalism. Her writing displays a kind of double longing - for Wales, and for the Argentina she left behind. Her poetry constantly moves between the colours, mythologies, and landscapes of the two countries and, in so doing, poses a series of important questions: where, and what, is home? How do we inhabit a particular time and place? This volume of essays brings together for the first time some of the most important research on Roberts's work that has emerged since the landmark republication of her Collected Poems in 2005. Written by a range of prominent scholars, writers and poets, each essay strives in some way to `place' Roberts, analysing the environments to which her writing responds and teasing out the interwoven skeins of her national, cultural, and political affiliations. Together, they pinpoint key concerns in Roberts's elusive, haunting work, and define her original contribution to twentieth-century literary culture.

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After outlining conventional accounts of Wales in the High Middle Ages, this book moves to more radical approaches to its subject. Rather than discussing the emergence of the March of Wales from the usual perspective of the ‘intrusive’ marcher lords, for instance, it is considered from a Welsh standpoint explaining the lure of the March to Welsh princes and its contribution to the fall of the native principality of Wales. Analysis of the achievements of the princes of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries focuses on the paradoxical process by which increasingly sophisticated political structures and a changing political culture supported an autonomous native principality, but also facilitated eventual assimilation of much of Wales into an English ‘empire’. The Edwardian conquest is examined and it is argued that, alongside the resultant hardship and oppression suffered by many, the rising class of Welsh administrators and community leaders who were essential to the governance of Wales enjoyed an age of opportunity. This is a book that introduces the reader to the celebrated and the less well-known men and women who shaped medieval Wales.

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Soul-Health explores the connection between reading and healing. The act of reading engages deeply with our emotions and psychology, and this book broadens our understanding of that process by the surprising revelation that feeling bad has been understood as the best thing for mental and spiritual health. The mental and emotional impact of reading expanded in the Middle Ages into a therapeutic tool for improving the health of the soul – a state called salus animae – and focusing on later Medieval England, the present study explores a core set of religious texts that identify themselves as treatments for the soul. These same texts, however, evoke powerfully negative emotions. Soul-Health investigates each of these emotions, offering an analysis of how fear, penance, compassion and longing could work to promote the health of the soul, demonstrating how interest in mental and spiritual health far pre-dates the modern period, and is more complex and balanced than simply trying to achieve joy.

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Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes (1916–77) is revered in Brazil as the first ardent defender, promoter and theorist of Brazilian cinema. A film professor, critic and historian, his dedication to cinema shaped a generation of influential film critics in his home country, and set the foundations for the serious study of film in Brazil. For the first time in English, this book brings together a selection of his essays for an English-speaking audience, with detailed explanatory introductions to each section for readers unfamiliar with the context of the writings of Salles Gomes. By blending together ruminations on global and national cinema, as well as avant-garde film and popular movies, the collection shows how the defence and promotion of a national cinema has been forged through dialogues with international trends, informed by commercial influences, and shaped by global and national political contexts. The book thus introduces readers to the international dimensions of Salles Gomes’s engagements with film, and in doing so reassesses the locatedness of his formulations on national cinema and signals their international dimensions.

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This book celebrates the work and contribution of Professor Janet Burton to medieval monastic studies in Britain. Burton has fundamentally changed approaches to the study of religious foundations in regional contexts (Yorkshire and Wales), placing importance on social networks for monastic structures and female Cistercian communities in medieval Britain; moreover, she has pioneered research on the canons and their place in medieval English and Welsh societies. This Festschrift comprises contributions by her colleagues, former students and friends – leading scholars in the field – who engage with and develop themes that are integral to Burton’s work. The rich and diverse collection in the present volume represents original work on religious life in the British Isles from the twelfth to the sixteenth century as homage to the transformative contribution that Burton has made to medieval monastic studies in the British Isles.

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The comparative analysis of Welsh and English found in this book is based on a translation corpus consisting of just over thirty novels and autobiographies from the late nineteenth century up to the early twenty-first century. Many of the original Welsh texts contain stylistic features which, in a context of intense bilingualism with English, benefit from the deliberate discussion and analysis in this volume. However, the work is intentionally descriptive rather than prescriptive, laying out patterns that are observed in the corpus, and making them available to Welsh writers and translators to adopt if or as required. As similarly the classic work in the field by Vinay and Darbelnet, this book examines its topics through the lens of translation techniques such as transposition, modulation and adaptation. .

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Having worked on projects around the world, strengthening and restoring historically significant structures from Windsor Castle to the parliament buildings in Canada, Peter James brings insight to the structural engineering of ancient Egypt. After fourteen years working on the historic buildings and temples of Egypt, and most recently the world's oldest pyramid, he now presents some of the more common theories surrounding the `collapsing' pyramid - along with new and innovative projections on the construction of the pyramids and the restoration of some of Cairo's most monumental structures from the brink of ruin. The decoding of historic construction from a builder's perspective is examined and explained - often contrary to many existing theories - and the book provides a new outlook on long-held assumptions, to embrace modern theories in a bid to preserve the past.

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Works on Anglo-Saxon kingship often take as their starting point the line from Beowulf: `that was a good king'. This monograph, however, explores what it means to be a king, and how kings defined their own kingship in opposition to other powers. Kings derived their royal power from a divine source, which led to conflicts between the interpreters of the divine will (the episcopate) and the individual wielding power (the king). Demonstrating how Anglo-Saxon kings were able to manipulate political ideologies to increase their own authority, this book explores the unique way in which Anglo-Saxon kings understood the source and nature of their power, and of their own authority.

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Darwinian Feminism in Early Science Fiction provides the first detailed scholarly examination of women’s SF in the early magazine period before the Second World War. Tracing the tradition of women’s SF back to the 1600s, the author demonstrates how women such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Shelley drew critical attention to the colonial mindset of scientific masculinity, which was attached to scientific institutions that excluded women. In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin’s theory of sexual selection provided an impetus for a number of first-wave feminists to imagine Amazonian worlds where women control their own bodies, relationships and destinies. Patrick B. Sharp traces how these feminist visions of scientific femininity, Amazonian power and evolutionary progress proved influential on many women publishing in the SF magazines of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and presents a compelling picture of the emergence to prominence of feminist SF in the early twentieth century before vanishing until the 1960s.

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Winner of the 2021 France Jones Prize for Welsh History. The first of a two-volume analysis of theology in Wales, this volume begins with the publication of Bishop William Morgan’s Bible in 1588 and concludes with the first phase of the Evangelical Revival in 1760. It assesses the development of Puritanism and of doctrine within the Church of England, Dissenting theology including Calvinism and Arminianism, the doctrinal vision of Griffith Jones Llanddowror, and the way in which an evangelistically vibrant moderate Calvinism contributed to the rise of the Methodist movement. As well as evaluating thought and ideas, it assesses the contribution of such vivid personalities as Morgan Llwyd, Charles Edwards, James and Jeremy Owen, Daniel Rowland and William Williams Pantycelyn.

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Gothic Britain is the first collection of essays to consider how the Gothic responds to, and is informed by, the British regional experience. Acknowledging how the so-called United Kingdom has historically been divided on nationalistic lines, the twelve original essays in this volume interrogate the interplay of ideas and generic innovations generated in the spaces between the nominal kingdom and its component nations and, innovatively, within those national spaces. Concentrating upon fictions depicting England, Scotland and Wales specifically, Gothic Britain comprehends the generic possibilities of the urban and the rural, of the historical and the contemporary, of the metropolis and the rural settlement – as well as exploring uniquely the fluid space that is the act of travel itself. Reading the textuality of some two hundred years of national and regional identity, Gothic Britain interrogates how the genre has depicted and questioned the natural and built environments of the island of Britain.

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For a very long time, Kant’s Doctrine of Right languished in relative neglect, even among those who wanted to defend a Kantian position in political philosophy. Kant’s more interesting claims about politics were often said to be located elsewhere. This anthology examines a wide range of issues discussed by Kant in the Doctrine of Right and other closely related texts, including his views on social contract theory, private property, human rights, welfare and equality, civil disobedience, perpetual peace, forgiveness and punishment, and marriage equality. The authors have all tested Kant’s arguments for possible political application, reaching different and sometimes opposing conclusions. The result is a highly original volume that not only enhances the understanding of Kant’s political philosophy, but also invites substantive debate within the Kantian tradition and beyond.

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Posthuman Gothic is an edited collection of thirteen chapters, and offers a structured, dialogical contribution to the discussion of the posthuman Gothic. Contributors explore the various ways in which posthuman thought intersects with Gothic textuality and mediality. The texts and media under discussion – from I am Legend to In the Flesh, and from Star Trek to The Truman Show, transgress the boundaries of genre, moving beyond the traditional scope of the Gothic. These texts, the contributors argue, destabilise ideas of the human in a number of ways. By confronting humanity and its Others, they introduce new perspectives on what we traditionally perceive as human. Drawing on key texts of both Gothic and posthumanist theory, the contributors explore such varied themes as posthuman vampire and zombie narratives, genetically modified posthumans, the posthuman in video games, film and TV, the posthuman as a return to nature, the posthuman’s relation to classic monster narratives, and posthuman biohorror and theories of prometheanism and accelerationism. In its entirety, the volume offers a first attempt at addressing the various intersections of the posthuman and the Gothic in contemporary literature and media.

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

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Between Wales and England is an exploration of eighteenth-century anglophone Welsh writing by authors for whom English-language literature was mostly a secondary concern. In its process, the work interrogates these authors’ views on the newly-emerging sense of ‘Britishness’, finding them in many cases to be more nuanced and less resistant than has generally been considered. It looks primarily at the English-language works of Lewis Morris, Evan Evans, and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg) in the context of both their Welsh- and English-language influences and time spent travelling between the two countries, considering how these authors responded to and reimagined the new national identity through their poetry and prose.

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