Books published by University of Wales Press

This is not a stuffy anthology of poetry. It offers a new way of viewing the Welsh past, showing how some aspects of it are best accessed through the words of its renowned poets.

A History of Money looks at how money as we know it developed through time. Starting with the barter system, the basic function of exchanging goods evolved into a monetary system based on coins made up of precious metals and, from the 1500s onwards, financial systems were established through which money became intertwined with commerce and trade, to settle by the mid-1800s into a stable system based upon Gold. This book presents its closing argument that, since the collapse of the Gold Standard, the global monetary system has undergone constant crisis and evolution continuing into the present day.

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 - at times against 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.

This book assimilates new scholarship and deploys a wealth of original archival research to present a fresh picture of Wales under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. It adopts novel perspectives on Welsh identity and allegiance to examine epochal events, such as the union of England and Wales under Henry VIII; the Reformation and the break with Rome; and the British Civil Wars and Glorious Revolution. It argues that Welsh experiences during this period can best be captured through widespread attachments to a shared history and language and to ideas of Britishness and monarchy. The volume looks beyond high politics to examine the rich tapestry of early modern Welsh life, considering concepts of gender and women's experiences; the role of language and cultural change; and expressions of Welsh identity beyond the principality's borders. --

This is the first study of the early formative years of one of Wales's most important cultural organisations - Sianel Pedwar Cymru (S4C). The volume chronicles the decisions and activities of the channel during its trial period between 1981-5. Through a detailed study of minutes, correspondence and interviews with individuals who were key to the channel's development during its early years, it chronicles the many challenges, successes and failures which faced the S4C Authority and its staff as they aimed to create a Welsh-language television service that would meet the desires and needs of the audience in Wales. S4C is no ordinary channel, and no other period in its history portrays this more effectively than the trial period given to it at the beginning of the 1980s.

"One summer, Ellie Evelyn Orrell reunited with her mother following the death of their respective grandfather and father. They returned to the small village of Betws Gwerful Goch in North Wales. Ellie returned from studying at university, while Jeanette had been studying the art of indigo dyeing in Japan. An Indigo Summer invites readers into their hillside garden as these two women grieve through art. Orrell draws on the history of indigo dyeing as she reflects on art, the Welsh landscape, and the strangeness of once-familiar places. Lyrical and moving, these stories include some of the illustrations created that summer, inspired by Welsh natural beauty." --

When and how did we humans lose our connection with nature and how do we find it again? Matthew Yeomans seeks to answer these questions as he walks more than 300 miles through the ancient and modern forests of Wales, losing himself in their stories (and on the odd unexpected diversion, too). Return to My Trees weaves together history and folklore with tales of industrial progress and decay. On his journey, he visits landmarks that once were home to ancient Druids, early Celtic saints, Norman Lords and the great mining communities that reshaped Wales. He becomes immersed in the woodlands that inspired the countrys great legends. At one point he even stumbles upon a herd of television-watching cows. As Yeomans walks, he reflects on these woods uncertain future, his own relationship with nature and the global problems we need to solve if humans are to truly make peace with the natural world. from tree-planting in ways that are actually beneficial to the environment and local communities to embedding the value of nature into our financial and economic systems. The result is a fascinating and funny adventure that offers insight into the past, present and future of Waless woodlands and shows what the rest of the world can learn from them.

A popular and readable book about the history of mathematicians in Wales, appealing to a wide audience ‿ including those who may think of maths as something alien that doesn‿t really belong to them.

The story of Frank Lloyd Wrights life is no less astounding than his greatest architectural works. He enmeshed himself eagerly in myth and hearsay, and revelled in the extravagance of his creative persona. Throughout his long career, Wright strongly resisted the suggestion that his accomplishments owed anything to earthly influences. As much as he wanted his achievements to be recognised, he wanted them to be unaccountable but they are not. This book reveals for the first time how his unbreakable self-belief and startling creative defiance both originated in the liberal religious and philosophical attitudes woven into his personality during his childhood deliberately so by his mother and by his many aunts and uncles, to honour the fierce Welsh radicalism of their ancestors.

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‿.

This book is about the impact of Welsh devolution on public policy. It examines how, from a fragile beginning, distinct political institutions and ideological position have made their mark not only in Wales but also in the UK and wider world.

This book discusses the significance of Lhwyd's discoveries in the fields of botany, palaeontology, epigraphy, antiquarian studies and linguistics.The book places Lhwyd's contribution in the context of recent work in these fields.This book provides links to websites for readers to follow up for further study.

- This is the first book to be published on this subject since 2006. The Welsh food scene has developed significantly in this time due to both internal and external factors, making this an important and unique exploration of the subject. - Features an exclusively illustrated cover and 10 x b&w internal line illustrations by Elise Tel and a 16-page, four-colour plates section- Carwyn Graves deftly combines history and travel/interviews with current producers, and writes with an accessible and engaging writing style that means readers with all levels of understanding about Welsh food will find something interesting in this book- This book will appeal to readers of titles such as GRAPE, OLIVE, PIG by Matt Goulding (HarperCollins, 2016), IRELAND'S GREEN LARDER by Margaret Hickey (Unbound, 2018) and A TASTE OF SCOTLAND by Sue Lawrence (Birlinn, 2019) and EATING TO EXTINCTION by Dan Saladino (2021). - Some well-known brands feature, such as Halen Mn salt and Gower Salt Marsh Lamb, the first new food to be awarded a UK Geographical Indication Status after the end of the transition period with the EU.a - Caerphilly cheese (featured in the book) recently had a viral social media moment, when a video of First Minister Mark Drakeford professing his love for it went viral in July 2020 - https://www.facebook.com/BBCPolitics/videos/330724394759728/.

The term 'Gothic' has been applied to examples of Australian cinema since the 1970s, often in arbitrary and divergent ways. This book examines a wide range of Australian films to trace their Gothic resemblances, characteristics and meanings. Concentrating on the occurrence of Gothic motifs, characters, landscapes and narratives, it argues for the recognition and relevance of a coherent Gothic heritage in Australian film. Considering a plethora of Gothic representatives in relation to four consistent and illuminating continuities (images of the family, ideas of monstrosity, generic hybridity and the occurrence of the sublime), this study investigates the appearance and asserts the significance of Australian Gothic films within their national, cultural, literary and cinematic traditions.

In the decades since the Second World War, the teenage witch has emerged as a major American cultural trope. Appearing in films, novels, comics and on television, adolescent witches have long reflected shifting societal attitudes towards the teenage demographic. At the same time, teen witches have also served as a means through which adolescent femininity can be conceptualised, interrogated and reimagined. Drawing on a wide theoretical framework - including the works of Deleuze and Foucault as well as recent new materialist philosophies - this book explores how the adolescent witch has evolved over the course of more than seventy years. Moving from the birth of the bobby soxer in the 1940s through to twenty-first-century teenage engagements with fourth-wave feminism, the author discusses a range of themes including embodiment, agency, identity, violence and sexuality.

This volume consists of five papers selected from a corpus of material researched over the past quarter of a century. None has previously been published, and they represent the author's interest in church history, medical history and the visual arts. Three of the five papers are based on lectures given at conferences or public occasions; the other two derive from research conducted at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History in 2010 and 2020.

Within the Euro-American literary tradition, Gothic stories of childhood and adolescence have often served as a tool for cultural propaganda, advancing colonialist, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies. This book turns our attention to modern and contemporary Gothic texts by hemispheric American writers who have refigured uncanny youth in ways that invert these cultural scripts. In the hands of authors ranging from Octavio Paz and Maryse Conde to N. Scott Momaday and Carmen Maria Machado, Gothic conventions become a means of critiquing pathological structures of power in the space of the Americas. As fictional children and adolescents defy persisting colonial and neo-imperialist architectures, navigate rigged systems of socioeconomic power, and attempt to frustrate patterns of gendered, anti-queer violence, the uncanny and the nightmarish in their lives call on readers to reckon with and resist these intersecting forms of injustice.

Theorising the Contemporary Zombie marks a new and exciting study into why zombies are popular today and what lessons can be learned from the undead.

Blumhouse Productions is the first academic book to examine one of the film industry's most successful producers of horror cinema. Individual chapters offer readers a deeper appreciation of how Blumhouse makes its films with an unusual, but successful, business model.

This book tells the compelling and revealing story of the women's movement in modern Wales. Its panoramic sweep takes the reader on a journey from the nineteenth-century campaigns in support of democracy and the right to vote, and in opposition to slavery, through to the construction of the labour movement in the twentieth century, and on to the more recent demands for sexual liberation and LGBTQ+ rights. At its core is the argument that the Welsh women's movement was committed to social democracy, rather than to liberal or conservative alternatives, and that material conditions were the central motivation of those women involved. Drawing on an array of sources, some of which appear in print for the first time, this is a vivid portrait of women who, out of a struggle for equality, individually and collectively, became political activists, grassroots journalists, members of councils and parliaments, and inspirational community leaders.

This book analyses the experience of the Mexican Republic in 1836-61 and provides an exemplary case study for newly independent states.

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