Böcker utgivna av University of Wales Press

This book explores the neglected history of women who were active in Liberal politics, campaigning for women's rights, the vote, and a full role for women in Welsh public life, at the end of the nineteenth century, and before the First World War. The over-arching argument of the book is that Welsh women's Liberal politics was distinctive, in its attempt to integrate an understanding of Liberalism which they shared with their English counterparts, and which included the aim of full equality for women, with a distinctively Welsh political agenda, and constructions of Welsh national identity. These constructions sometimes included a positive view of women in the nation, but in times of political crisis redefined gender on a more reactionary model.

Analyzes the state of the Welsh language at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This title aims to update our understanding of Welsh as a living language; how its use, learning, understanding teaching, evolution and promulgation are developing in the world of the 21st century where Welsh is spreading to the internet and encyclopaedias.

This text refers to more than 300 Welsh graves and discusses not so much about the graves themselves but about the people buried in them. It provides potted biographies of the individuals involved and offers some intriguing juxtapositions.

This book comprises of a re-publication of Thomas Matthews' 1910 edition of Welsh documents held in the Archives Nationale of France, together with new introductions to the original work and to its editor.

As Professor of English Law at the University of London, Sir David Hughes Parry QC laid the foundations for the development of the Department of Law at the London School and Economics into a centre of excellence in legal scholarship. This study offers an account of his career as a lawyer, legal scholar, university policy-maker and law reformer.

This is the first book to examine in a systematic way the entrepreneurial society of the Welsh Valleys. Until now, almost everything written about the society created by the Welsh coal industry has been about the workers and the unions, and there has been a significant gap, which needed to be filled if a rounded picture of life in the south Wales valleys during the coal boom was to be achieved. The book looks at the various sources of wealth in the area - coal owning, railway building, possession of land in crucial areas, contracting, building, property development, shopkeeping - and at the various origins from which the first-generation entrepreneurs came. It then examines closely the networks of power and influence that built up among the second-generation entrepreneurs in the close and claustrophobic middle-class society of the Porth-Pontypridd area. Its method is to take one extended family central to that society, together with its vast network of friends and collaborators, and to examine in great detail, from original sources, the often hair-raising business methods of these people, as well as their conflicts of interest at times of industrial unrest. At the same time, the changes in Valleys life are mirrored in the history of this group: the original 'rags-to-riches' stories of so many of the first generation; the self-sufficient confidence of so many of the second generation, for whom the coal boom seemed bound to last for ever; and the gradual move, thereafter, out of the coal industry and down to the towns on the coast, just in time to avoid the decline of the industry.

Assesses how policies developed by the National Assembly for Wales are affecting gender inequalities and investigates whether they are having an impact on social justice for women in Wales. Focusing on distinct policy domains, this book explores gender politics in a devolved Wales.

Explores the state of French fiction through an examination of the work of five major French writers, Annie Ernaux, Pascal Quignard, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz and Patrick Modiano. This book deals with some of the writers on British and American university French courses.

This volume approaches the fascinating figure of Iolo Morganwg - stonemason, poet and literary forger - from three distinct but interrelated angles. They all take as their starting point Iolo Morganwg's 'marginality' within mainstream literary society both in London and in Wales and demonstrate the strategies that he used to overcome the frustrations of his situation. Iolo's notoriety as a literary forger provides the context for the first discussion in the volume, which considers his efforts to pass on his own work as that of famous Welsh writers of the past. This chapter looks at how important the editorial apparatus with which Iolo surrounded his forgeries was to his attempt to ensure their satisfactory reception. Secondly, two collections of printed books owned by Iolo and containing marginal commentary in his hand are explored. The discussion here demonstrates Iolo's keen interest in the forging of a path for the Welsh language within the developing public domain of the regional eisteddfodau and also his complex personal relations with some of the more successful authors of his day. Iolo's vulnerability and marginality within the context of a Welsh public sphere are both brought to the fore in this chapter. Finally, the volume turns to the marginalia left by Iolo on letters within his collection of correspondence, showing his extraordinary creativity and bringing to attention for the first time some of his unpublished work in the fields of Welsh and English poetry and on matters relating to the Welsh language.

Uses a case study of the Denbighshire town of Ruthin to discuss both the significance of Englishness versus Welshness and of gender distinctions in the network of small Anglo-Welsh urban centres which emerged in north Wales following the English conquest of 1282.

Gender (defined as the knowledge about perceived distinctions between the sexes) is an important signifier of borders as constructed and contested lines of differences. This book explores this new interdisciplinary field and develops it further.

Herbert Williams is one of Wales' most celebrated and distinguished writers. A man of many talents, he is a poet, novelist, short story writer and historian. This book provides a critical survey of his life and writing. It is a combination of biography and critical appraisal and the chapters dovetail together to provide a continuous narrative combined with an appreciation of the man's work. It includes the following areas or elements: Biographical information, taking Herbert from his beginnings in Aberystwyth to the present day. It follows the man from his school days to early work as a journalist, from his time as a Producer at the BBC to his achievements as a poet and prose writer.It looks at the significant influences on his life - and, therefore, on his writing. These include his early days in a working-class house dominated by books with a father who actively encouraged him to read. These influences also include the writers who inspired him and his early attempts at finding his own voice, as well as Herbert's time in Bronllys Hospital, as a fifteen year old TB patient and the death of a younger brother from TB were pivotal moments in his life. They have influenced, in one way or another, almost everything he has written or spoken about since those traumatic days.The book examines in some detail the effect of these experiences on his development as a writer and as a man. It presents an analysis of the many elements of Herbert's creative life. He has always been an eclectic writer, turning his hand to biography and short stories as easily as he does to poetry. What inspires and drives Herbert Williams to keep writing and publishing, in such a wide sphere. What makes him want to communicate his ideas and emotions, often very painful ones at that?

Provides an introduction to the politics, culture, society and economy of modern Wales. This book examines the differences that are found in Wales. It focuses on the connections that have been forged across these differences and that structure Welsh society. It explores key concepts and debates in the social sciences.

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's best-known poet internationally.Tony Brown provides an introduction to R. S. Thomas's 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's poetic achievement. In addition to presenting a full discussion of Thomas's poetry, and its movements over time between personal, spiritual and political concerns, Tony Brown also examines Thomas's 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.

Work on the miners' Lock-Out of 1926 tends to focus on the perspective of the National Union of Mineworkers, while nothing has been written which attempts to examine, for example, how miner's wives coped for six months without pay. This book investigates the Lock-Out from the perspective of gender relations.

Ranging from studies of the influence of desert eremiticism upon a variety of expressions of religious enclosure in England to the sexualized spirituality of the high Middle Ages, this book contains essays that demonstrate how discourses of anchoritic enclosure were utilized to different ends at different periods throughout the Middle Ages.

This book provides the visitor to the castles of Wales with a history and description of the main castles open to the public. There is an easy-to-understand outline of how castles developed, as well as features that give more detail of the different parts of a castle, such as keeps and gatehouses.

A brand new Pocket Guide which charts the concise history of sport in Wales since 1800. The book locates the character and structure of sport within the wider social, political and economic context that shaped it.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, a twelfth-century cleric, was the first person to compose a detailed and continuous history of Britain from its origins to the domination of the Anglo-Saxons. This book illustrates the close ties between Geoffrey's notion of British and Arthurian society and other materials from medieval Wales and Ireland.

Offers an introduction to British Gothic literature. This book examines works by Gothic authors such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin and Mary Shelley against the backdrop of eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century British social and political history.

This book examines how Wilkie Collins's interest in medical matters developed in his writing through exploration of his revisions of the late eighteenth-century Gothic novel from his first sensation novels to his last novels of the 1880s. Throughout his career, Collins made changes in the prototypical Gothic scenario. The aristocratic villains, victimized maidens and medieval castles of classic Gothic tales were reworked and adapted to thrill his Victorian readership. With the advances of neuroscience and the development of criminology as a significant backdrop to most of his novels, Collins drew upon contemporary anxieties and increasingly used the medical to propel his criminal plots. While the prototypical castles were turned into modern medical institutions, his heroines no longer feared ghosts but the scientist's knife. This study hence underlines the way in which Collins's Gothic revisions increasingly tackled medical questions, using the medical terrain to capitalize on the readers' fears. It also demonstrates how Wilkie Collins's fiction reworks Gothic themes and presents them through the prism of contemporary scientific, medical and psychological discourses, from debates revolving around mental physiology to those dealing with heredity and transmission. The book's structure is chronological covering a selection of texts in each chapter, with a balance between discussion of the more canonical of Collins's texts such as The Woman in White, The Moonstone and Armadale and some of his more neglected writings.

Challenges the critical view that Gothic is a vehicle for anti-Catholic, anticlerical sentiment. This book appeals the view that the Catholic motifs contained in Gothic novels (monks, nuns, abbeys, confessionals) signify anti-Catholic prejudice and anti-Church subversiveness on the part of the author and the audience.

First printed in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, this book has been out of print for several years and is highly sought after by researchers in the field of Medieval cultural studies. "e;Double Agents"e; was the first book length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on board the insights of contemporary critical theory, especially feminist theory, in order to elucidate the complex challenges of both the absence and presence of women in the historical record. That is to say, unlike the two earlier books on women in this period (by Fell, 1984, and by Chance, 1986), this is not a book about only those women in the written record (whether we think of it as historical or literary) of Anglo-Saxon England, it also tackles the question of how the feminine is modelled, used, and metaphorised in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when women themselves are absent.This book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to Alfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the "e;Exeter Book Riddles"e; or "e;Cadmon's Hymn"e;, the first so-called poem in English, or the female "e;Lives of Saints"e;) as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; and, the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).

This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930 - 1992), most famous for their collabarative works Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare.

Brings together the interpretations of the Wohunge Group from scholars working on the fields of medieval spirituality, gender, and the anchoritic tradition, providing literary, theological, linguistic, and cultural context for the works associated with the Wohunge Group. This book discusses and explains the impact of these works.

Why, at a time when the majority of us no longer believe in ghosts, demons or the occult, does Gothic continue to have such a strong grasp upon literature, cinema and popular culture? This book answers the question by exploring some of the ways in which we have applied Gothic tropes to our everyday fears. The book opens with The Turn of the Screw, a text dealing in the dangers adults pose to children whilst simultaneously questioning the assumed innocence of all children. Staying with the domestic arena, it explores the various manifestations undertaken by the haunted house during the twentieth century, from the bombed-out spaces of the blitz ('The Demon Lover' and The Night Watch) to the designer bathrooms of wealthy American suburbia (What Lies Beneath). The monsters that emerge through the uncanny surfaces of the Gothic can also be terror monsters, and after a discussion of terrorism and atrocity in relation to burial alive, the book examines the relationship between the human and the inhuman through the role of the beast monster as manifestation of the evil that resides in our midst (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Birds). It is with the dangers of the body that the Gothic has been most closely associated and, during the later twentieth century, paranoia attaches itself to skeletal forms and ghosts in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Sexuality and/as disease is one of the themes of Patrick McGrath's work (Dr Haggard's Disease and 'The Angel') and the issue of skeletons in the closet is also explored through Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner'. However, sexuality is also one of the most liberating aspects of Gothic narratives. After a brief discussion of camp humour in British television drama series Jekyll, the book concludes with a discussion of the apparitional lesbian through the work of Sarah Waters.

A comprehensive guide to the most important church and chapel buildings in Wales from the early middle ages to the present day. Introduced with an overview of the religious history of the country, this book explores and illustrates Wales's surviving churches and chapels by region.

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

Offers a narrative of a period when a group of Welshmen declared war on England with gelignite and fire bombs. This work focuses on the role of two main protagonists of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC), the Movement for the Defence of Wales, Owen Williams and John Jenkins.