Böcker utgivna av University of Wales Press

Dyma lyfr arloesol gan arbenigwyr yn y maes, sy'n cynnig golwg ar rai o brif gysyniadau'r astudiaeth ar theatr a pherfformio dros y blynyddoedd diwethaf.

This book uses models of 'world literature' to present this 'quintessentially English' writer as a pioneering figure in an Anglophone Welsh literary tradition, a controversial reading that contributes to the present-day reconfiguration of cultural relations between Wales, England, Scotland

Examines from a variety of perspectives, and offers a range of interpretations, of the type of rhetoric associated with the anchoritic experience during the Middle Ages and draws conclusions on the many purposes of that rhetoric.

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

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

A full-length study of Swansea's urban development from the late 18th to the late 19th century. It tells the 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 lost this status in the face of rapid urban development elsewhere in the country.

A comprehensive study of medieval Arthurian literature, comprising of literary explorations together with chapters on the political and social manifestations of the Arthurian legend and the influence of continental romance traditions.

"A Social History of the Cinema in Wales" offers a perspective on the place of cinema in Welsh popular culture. The 'golden age' of cinema entertainment is now half a century behind us, yet it continues to linger in popular memory.

This interdisciplinary study of medieval English anchoritism from 1080-1450, explodes the myth of the anchorhold as solitary death-cell, reveals it instead as the site of potential intellectual exchange, and demonstrates an anchoritic spirituality in synch with the wider medieval world.

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.

This modern history of Gibraltar updates and enhances scholarship on the Rock's history by bringing together the author's extensive archival research and developments in the secondary literature surrounding British Gibraltar. Central to its narrative is an examination of the development of a Gibraltarian community amidst British imperial rise and decline and Anglo-Spanish diplomatic vicissitudes. Gibraltar: A Modern History, is the first twenty-first century treatment of the Rock's history and as such it augments and, in many ways, replaces older treatments of Gibraltar's History.

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 (Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina), whilst also providing detailed aesthetic analyses of individual stage and screen adaptations.

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.

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

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

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.

Cyfrol sydd yn trafod mewn modd difyr a darllenawdwy rhai o'r pynciau mwyaf heriol a dadleuol ym myd y gyfraith yng Nghymru heddiw.

This ground-breaking anthology presents loyalist and radical poetry and prose from the newspapers, almanacs and periodicals current in Wales from the outbreak of the French Revolution in1789 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802, together with an extended introduction and two maps.

Presents the events of the period 1485 - 1660 that were decisive in the development of modern Wales. This book covers from the crowning of Henry Tudor as King of England in 1485 to the profoundly transformed religious and economic conditions that the Wales and Welsh society would stride forward in a committed partnership within a greater Britain.

This experimental volume of literary criticism offers various interpretations of the work of the poet Menna Elfyn, and gives an outline of our relationship with literature and our reading habits. It is an attempt to provide a fresh interpretation of the work by experimenting for the first time in Welsh with the epistolary method of criticism, through a series of fictional letters. This is also the first extended study of Menna Elfyn's poetry: addressed to the poet's work in particular, but also looking at contemporary issues such as interpretation, performance and the marketing of literature in contemporary Wales. Academic practices are vigorously challenged by walking the line between 'fact' and 'fiction' to create a multi-vocal and readable criticism reflecting the complex and multifaceted nature of the reading process.

A study of the Jewish communities of South Wales in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both in their everyday lives and in more dramatic and sensational moments. New edition.

The source of the Nile had long eluded and tormented explorers, and John Hanning Speke's discovery of Lake Victoria in 1858 elevated him to the pantheon of heroes of African exploration, alongside Livingstone and Stanley. But the part played by the Welsh mining engineer John Petherick in the discovery was ignored after he was branded a slave trader by Speke, and the controversy that followed ended with Petherick ruined and Speke dead. This first biography of Petherick places him at the centre of one of the great discoveries in African exploration - and as the focus of a dispute that rocked the geographical establishment. Was Petherick a rogue, as portrayed by some, or the victim of a conspiracy that destroyed his reputation and denied him a share of the credit for his part in one of the greatest feats in African exploration?

Poetry, Geography, Gender examines how questions of place, identity and creative practice intersect in the work of some of Wales' best known contemporary poets, including Gillian Clarke, Gwyneth Lewis, Ruth Bidgood and Sheenagh Pugh. Merging traditional literary criticism with cultural-political and geographical analysis, Alice Entwistle shows how writers' different senses of relationship with Wales, its languages, history and imaginative, as well as political, geography feeds the form as well as the content of their poetry. Her innovative critical study thus takes particular interest in the ways in which author, text and territory help to inform and produce each other in the culturally complex and confident small nation that is twenty-first century Wales.

France's Colonial Legacies offers a timely intervention in the debates around the French empire and its place in the life of the contemporary nation, drawing on the expertise of researchers working in the fields of politics, media, cultural studies, literature and film, to offer a wide-ranging picture of remembrance in contemporary France.

This volume explores the changing nature of the settlement archaeology in north-west Wales over a period of almost two millennia, setting the region within wider discourses on the nature of the societies occupying Britain between 1150 BC and AD 1050.