Böcker utgivna av University of Wales Press

What comes to mind when we think of swans? Likely their beauty in domestic settings, their preserved status, their association with royalty, and possibly even the phrase 'swan song'. This book explores the emergence of each of these ideas, starting with an examination of the medieval swan in natural history, exploring classical writings and their medieval interpretations and demonstrating how the idea of a swan's song developed. The book then proceeds to consider literary motifs of swan-to-human transformation, particularly the legend of the Knight of the Swan. Although this legend is known today only through Wagner's opera, it was a best-seller in the Middle Ages, and courts throughout Europe strove to be associated as ancestors of this Swan Knight. Consequently, the swan was projected as an icon of courtly and eventual royal status. The book's third chapter looks at the swan as icon of the Lancasters, particularly important during the reign of Richard II and the War of the Roses, and the final chapter examines the swan as an important item of feasting, focusing on cookery and husbandry to argue that over time the right to keep swans became an increasingly restricted right controlled by the English crown. Each of the swan's medieval associations are explored as they developed over time to the modern day. a

Curating and the Legacies of Colonialism in Contemporary Iberia redefines Iberian and curatorial Studies by situating curatorial practice at the centre of the configuration of modern, postcolonial societies in the Iberian context.

Theatre and the Macabre explores the morbid and gruesome onstage, from freak shows to the French Grand Guignol, from immersive theatre to dark tourism, stopping along the way to look at phantoms, severed heads, dances of death and dismembered bodies.

Wassail songs are part of Welsh folk culture, but what exactly are they? When are they sung? Why? And where do stars and pretty ribbons fit in? This study addresses these questions, identifying and discussing the various forms of winter wassailing found in Wales in times past and present. It focuses specifically on the Welsh poetry written over the centuries at the celebration of several rituals - most particularly at Christmas, the turn of the year, and on Twelfth Night - which served a distinct purpose. The winter wassailing aspired to improve the quality of the earth's fertility in three specific spheres: the productivity of the land, the animal kingdom, and the human race. This volume provides a rich collection of Welsh songs in their original language, translated into English for the first time, and with musical notation. It also provides a comprehensive analysis of these poems and of the society in which they were sung.

Geoffrey Chaucer wrote at a turning point in the history of timekeeping, but many of his poems demonstrate a greater interest in the moral dimension of time than in the mechanics of the medieval clock. Chaucer and the Ethics of Time examines Chaucer's sensitivity to the insecurity of human experience amid the temporal circumstances of change and time-passage, as well as strategies for ethicising historical vision in several of his major works. While wasting time was sometimes viewed as a sin in the late Middle Ages, Chaucer resists conventional moral dichotomies and explores a complex and challenging relationship between the interior sense of time and the external pressures of linearism and cyclicality. Chaucer's diverse philosophical ideas about time unfold through the reciprocity between form and discourse, thus encouraging a new look at not only the characters' ruminations on time in the tradition of St Augustine and Boethius, but also manifold narrative sequences and structures, including anachronism.

This book considers the fiction of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-73) in their original material and cultural contexts of the early-to-mid Victorian period in Ireland. Le Fanu's longstanding relationship with the Dublin University Magazine, a popular literary and political journal, is a crucial context in the examination of his work. Likewise, Le Fanu's fiction is considered as part of a wider surge of supernatural, historical and antiquarian activity by Irish Protestants in the period following the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland (1801). Le Fanu's habit of writing and re-writing stories is discussed in detail, a practice that has engendered much confusion and consternation. Posthumous collections of Le Fanu's work are compared with original publications, demonstrating the importance of these material and cultural contexts. This book reveals new critical readings of some of Le Fanu's best known fiction, while also casting light on some of his regrettably overlooked work through recontextualisation.

Women's Lives recalls and celebrates the work of Elizabeth Petroff, an eminent scholar of Medieval Women Mystics, by proposing that the lives of medieval women may be read as models of positive transgression. Their representation and reception make powerful arguments for equality, agency and authority on behalf of the writers who employed them.

This book represents the first full-length study of the prevalence of domestic imagery in late medieval religious literature. It examines as yet understudied patterns of household imagery and allegory across four fifteenth-century spiritual texts, all of which are Middle English translations of earlier Latin works. These texts are drawn from a range of popular genres of medieval religious writing, including the spiritual guidance text, Life of Christ, and collection of revelations received by visionary women. All of the texts discussed in this book have identifiable late medieval readers, which further enables a discussion of the way in which these book users might have responded to the domestic images in each one. This is a hugely important area of enquiry, as the literal late medieval household was becoming increasingly culturally important during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and these texts' frequent recourse to domestic imagery would have been especially pertinent.

This is the first full-length study of a Welsh family of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries who were not drawn from the princely class. Though they were of obscure and modest origins, the patronage of great lords of the March - such as the Mortimers of Wigmore or the de Bohun earls of Hereford - helped them to become prominent in Wales and the March, and increasingly in England. They helped to bring down anyone opposed by their patrons - like Llywelyn, prince of Wales in the thirteenth century, or Edward II in the 1320s. In the process, they sometimes faced great danger but they contrived to prosper, and unusually for Welshmen one branch became Marcher lords themselves. Another was prominent in Welsh and English government, becoming diplomats and courtiers of English kings, and over some five generations many achieved knighthood. Their fascinating careers perhaps hint at a more open society than is sometimes envisaged.

Mae'r gyfrol hon yn tywys cyfieithwyr newydd a'r rhai sydd a'u bryd ar weithio yn y maes trwy brif egwyddorion llunio cyfieithiad da. Mae'n trafod gwaith cyfieithwyr o safbwynt diogelu lle'r iaith yn y gymdeithas, yn egluro beth sydd ei angen ar ddarpar gyfieithwyr o ran sgiliau a gwybodaeth, ac yn dangos y gwych a'r gwachul er mwyn cynorthwyo cyfieithwyr i lunio gwaith da heb y llediaith a'r cyfieithu lletchwith. Mae'n taflu goleuni ar yr amryfal dechnegau y mae cyfieithwyr cymwys yn eu defnyddio, o'r broses ddarllen hyd at y broses adolygu, ac mae'n gwneud hynny trwy enghreifftiau o gyfieithiadau go iawn a gyhoeddwyd. Mae'n trafod cyfieithu peirianyddol, dyfodol y proffesiwn a sut i wneud y defnydd gorau o'r dechnoleg ddiweddaraf. Mae ymchwil academaidd hefyd yn elfen gref o'r gwaith, ac mae'r cyngor a'r canllawiau yn seiliedig ar yr ysgolheictod trylwyraf ynghyd a phrofiad yr awdur o'r byd cyfieithu proffesiynol.

Gothic Metaphysics is a radical departure from Freudian-centred criticism of Gothic literature. It aims to explore our modern dilemma in the time of the Anthropocene, by bringing to light the role of Gothic since its inception in 1764 in holding space for a worldview familiar to certain mystical traditions - such as alchemy, which held to the view of a living cosmos yet later deemed 'uncanny' and anachronistic by Freud. In developing this idea, Gothic Metaphysics explores the influence of the Middle Ages on the emergence of Gothic, seeing it as an encrypted genre that serves as the site of a 'live burial' of 'animism', which has emerged in the notion of 'quantum entanglement' best described by Carl G. Jung and physicist Wolfgang Pauli in the theory of synchronicity linking alchemy with quantum mechanics. This relationship finds itself in dialogue with the Gothic's long-held concern for the 'sentience of space and place', as described by renowned Gothic scholar Fredrick Frank. The volume Gothic Metaphysics is multi-valent and explores how Gothic has sustained the view of a sentient world despite the disqualification of nature - not only in respect to the extirpation of animism as a worldview, but also with regard to an affirmation of consciousness beyond that of human exceptionalism.

The end of the second millennium witnessed an increase in science-fictional apocalyptic narratives globally. There is a noteworthy difference between such fictions from Latin America and the anglophone world and those from Spain, in which scientific explanations of events coexist with biblically-inspired plots, characters and imagery. This is the first book-length study of either science-fictional novels or apocalyptic literature in that country, analysing six such works between 1990 and 2005. Within a theoretical framework that includes critical and genre theories, archetypal criticism, and biblical scholarship, the book explains this phenomenon as a result of three historical factors: the 'Two Spains', Spanish 'difference', and the 'Pact of Silence', a tacit agreement that made justice and accountability impossible in the name of a peaceful transition to democracy. It repressed any processing of the historical trauma experienced during the Civil War and dictatorship, trauma that manifests itself symbolically in these fictions.

The book describes the development of religious thought in Wales between 1760 and 1900. Although the emphasis is on religious thought, it also includes much on social history including industrialisation, popular Nonconformity, revivalism, the interest in foreign missions and the stirrings of social radicalism.

This book presents a new exploration of an ancient European Druids, people who could foretell the will of the gods and who left revealing archaeological evidence of their rites and beliefs.

The exciting story of the Welsh immigrants and their descendants who made a disproportionate contribution to the creation and growth of the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth.

States are powerful actors in world politics, and we wish to hold them accountable - especially when they violate the rights of their people. By benefitting from Immanuel Kant's philosophy, this book explores the requirements to and consequences of holding states as responsible agents in a morally imperfect world.

The Gothic is more than just maidens-in-peril fleeing supernatural villains in another age. Historically, it was a form used to depict and critique the dangerous labour conditions faced by workers during the Industrial Revolution.

This collection examines young adult Gothic fiction to demonstrate how the contemporary resurgence of the Gothic in texts for young people signals anxieties about, and hopes for, young people in the twenty-first century.

A path-breaking study of India's Science Fiction, which investigates how mythology, ideology and technology shape contemporary SF.

A study of the thirty-five libraries built by Andrew Carnegie in Wales as an illustration of his world-wide commitment to the public library movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. These libraries and their social, cultural and architectural significance have never been studied before.

This book argues that industrial patriarchy in South Wales established an exclusive though damaging form of structural masculine conformity expressed through a limited -and limiting - set of gendered practices.

A new and fully-updated centenary edition of Raymond Williams's seminal collection of essays on nationhood and cultural identity, Who Speaks for Wales?

Gothic Utterance explores the vital role played by haunted and haunting voices in American Gothic literature produced between the Revolutionary War and the close of the nineteenth century, discussing pressing questions of national identity and subjecthood, and emphasising the ethical value of listening to unsettling or distressing voices.

Monster texts like Frankenstein reflect monstrosity in their narrative structure to create narratives of resistance against systemic cultural oppression. This book uses different critical theories to trace these narrative patterns in novels by Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood and Angela Carter.

Through a comparative analysis of twelve literary case studies, this book investigates societal discourses relating to citizenship, class, gender and ethnicity within the structures of the Scandinavian welfare state and French Republican universalism.

This book provides a unique oversight of judges' work and contemporary legal challenges in Common Law and Civil Law countries, based on the legal practice and testimonies of senior members of the judiciary speaking up for justice and the law.

By comparing different screen adaptations of the story of Romulo Gallegos's notorious villainess, Dona Barbara Unleashed reveals how over the years subversively strong female characters have become increasingly accepted by society and welcomed by audiences.

This book brings together jurisprudential debates on international criminal law, international law scholarship on the limits of state sovereignty, and applied political philosophy concerning responsibility and accountability in the context of mass political crimes and state criminality. It offers a compelling view of legal reasoning concerning accountability regimes in the Global South.

This book takes British horror films of the 2000s as a case study to theorise transnational genre hybridity, which combines genres from different national cinemas.

This long-duree study contributes to a deep knowledge of the formation of ruling elites, nobility, political class and rich families in southern Europe (Spain) during the transition from the Ancien Regime to the nineteenth century's new liberal regimes.