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Explores the ways in which the distinctive Welsh county of Cardigan and its inhabitants (known as Cardis) have been represented during the late modern era.

This book is the first to focus on the exile-poetry link in the case of Argentina since the 1950s. Throughout Argentina's history, authors and important political figures have lived and written in exile yet, conversely, contemporary Argentina is a nation of immigrants from Europe and the rest of Latin America.

Patrick McGrath is one of Britain's foremost contemporary novelists but very little has been written about his work to date. This new book offers readings of McGrath's fiction informed by recent scholarship and evaluates his creative contribution to the continuation of the Gothic tradition into the twenty-first century.

Why are we still drawn to the work of Alfred Hitchcock so long after his final film appeared? What remains to see? What could there possibly be left to say about tales that are overwhelmingly familiar? Why, moreover, have many of Hitchcock's films entered the popular imagination and enjoyed an eventful life far from the screen? What is the source of Hitchcock's magic? This book answers these questions about the influence and ongoing appeal of Hitchcock's work by focussing upon the fabric of the films themselves, upon the way in which they enlist and sustain our desire, holding our attention by constantly withholding something from us. We keep watching, keep revisiting the stories, because there is always something left to see and know. The book combines detailed textual analysis of a number of Hitchcock's most famous films - Psycho, Rear Window, Rebecca, North by Northwest, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Birds - with more general discussion of the director's complete body of work. Drawing upon the poststructuralist theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, it takes issue with the biographical and psychoanalytic approaches that have dominated studies of Hitchcock's films to argue instead for the significance of textuality. Hitchcock's Magic is an innovative, lively, and readable book which challenges critical orthodoxy and breaks new ground in the field.

Atlantic slavery does not loom large in the traditional telling of Welsh history. Yet Wales, like many regions of Europe, was deeply affected by the forced migration of captive Africans. Welsh commodities, like copper and brass made in Swansea, were used to purchase slaves on the African coast and some Welsh products, such as woollens from Montgomeryshire, were an important feature of plantation life in the West Indies. In turn, the profits of plantation agriculture flowed back into Wales, to be invested in new industries or to be lavished on country mansions. This book looks at Slave Wales between 1650 and 1850, bringing the most up-to-date scholarship on Atlantic slavery to bear on the Welsh experience. New research by Chris Evans casts light on previously unknown episodes, such as Welsh involvement with slave-based copper mining in nineteenth-century Cuba, and illuminates in new and disturbing ways familiar features of Welsh history - like the woollen industry - that have previously unsuspected 'slave dimensions'. Many Welsh people turned against slavery in the late eighteenth century, but Welsh abolitionism was never a particularly powerful force. Indeed, Chris Evans demonstrates that Welsh participation the slave Atlantic lasted well beyond the abolition of Britain's slave trade in 1807 and the ending of slavery in Britain's Caribbean empire in 1834.

This book covers both the royal families that existed in pre-Conquest Wales and the predominantly English royal families that have ruled over Wales since medieval times. The changing relationships between the rulers and the ruled in Wales are examined, over a period from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The aim is to tell the story of how Wales has figured in the development of the British royal family and its traditions. The author's previous books covered individual members of the royal families; although this book will inevitably cover individuals in the telling of the story, to some extent, the book will concentrate less on the personalities and more on the surrounding tradition and pageantry (e.g., investiture ceremonies), and there is ample scope for covering new ground. An index and select bibliography will be provided, as well as illustrations, the latter largely of monuments and locations in Wales associated with the book's theme.

This book provides a detailed analysis of the political arguments about the place of Muslims in contemporary France, and also discusses the ideas put forward by a range of Muslim thinkers. France has become the setting for one of the most important conflicts in the modern world. On the one hand, it possesses a rigidly organized, centralized state, whose bureaucrats and civil servants are animated by a code of secular activism. On the other hand, France is also the home for Europe's largest Muslim minority, variously estimated at numbering between four and six million people. This means that in terms of simple numbers, France can be counted as the world's fifteenth Islamic power. Previous conflicts with religion have left a deep impression on French political culture: from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century conflicts between Catholics and Protestants played to the formation of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1940. In recent decades, Muslims have been stigmatized as an irreconcilable minority unable to adapt to the secular culture of the majority of French citizens. This work draws out the political implications of the current conflict. It is based on events and publications produced in a single five year period, beginning with the shock of the 2002 Presidential elections, in which Le Pen was the second most successful candidate, ranging through the legislation of March 2004 which banned the Islamic headscarf from French state schools, and which sparked off a series of bad-tempered exchanges between left and right-wing French nationalists, anti-racism campaigners, secularists, anti-clericals and a variety of Muslim authors.

Beirdd yr Uchelwyr' in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are considered to be the pinnacle of the bardic tradition in Wales in the Middle Ages. This book gives a comprehensive look at the period's literature in all its aspects. Attention is given to masters of the cywydd, such as Dafydd ap Gwilym, Iolo Goch, Guto'r Glyn, Dafydd Nanmor and Lewys Glyn Cothi. New edition.

Part of "Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages" series, this book describes production, dissemination and evolution of Arthurian material in French and Occitan from the twelfth to the fifteenth century.

The aim of this book is to engender Mexican folk art and locate women at its centre by studying the processes of creation, distribution, and consumption, as well as examining iconographic aspects, and elements of class and ethnicity, from the perspective of gender. The author will demonstrate that the topic provides unique insights into Mexican culture, and has enormous relevance within and without the country, given the fact that much folk art is made for the United States and Europe, either in terms of the tourists who buy it on coming to Mexico, or that which is exported.

Stephen King is the world's best-selling horror writer. His work is ubiquitous on bookstore, supermarket, and personal library shelves and has been faithfully adapted into some of the most iconic horror films of the twentieth century. This study explores his writing through the lenses of contemporary literary and cultural theory. Through analyses of some of his best-known work, including "e;Carrie"e; and "e;Misery,"e; the authors argue that King offers ways of encountering and understanding some of our deepest fears about life and death, the past and the future, technological change, other people, monsters, ghosts, and the supernatural.This is the first extended critical-theoretical engagement with King's writing, and will be of interest to students, academics, and fans of horror fiction.

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.

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.

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.