Books published by University of Wales Press

"The Book of Margery Kempe" has generally been judged to be over-emotional and its structure regarded as at worst non-existent, at best naive. This work argues instead that The Book unfolds a creative experience of memory as spiritual progress, and explores Margery's meditational experience in the context of visual and verbal iconography.

Discusses about Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, and why they matter today. This book mainly concerns how pictures are understood by the people who use them - patrons, museum curators, and the general public - rather than by the painters who paint them.

Provides an overview of and introduction to the Towneley cycle of plays, a 32-play cycle written in c 1500, which begins with the fall of Lucifer and ends with the Last Judgement, and was performed as part of the festival of Corpus Christi in Wakefield. This volume examines the cycle's textual history, and discusses issues of language and style.

A collection of essays by leading scholars that investigates the significance of Wales's medieval religious houses in the development of Welsh society, politics and culture.

This book examines welsh perspectives on the search for sustainable law and policy solutions to modern environmental threats.

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel is the first monograph to systematically explore George Eliot's relationship to Gothic genres. It considers the ways in which the author's ethics link to sensational story-telling tropes. Reappraising the major works of fiction, this study compares passages of Eliot's writing with sequences from eighteenth and nineteenth-century Gothic works. Royce Mahawatte examines Eliot's deployment of, for example, the incarcerated heroine in Middlemarch, doppelgangers in Romola and vampiric queerness in Daniel Deronda. In doing so he lifts Eliot from the boundaries of social realism and places her within a broader and richer Victorian literary scene than has been previously considered.

Female Gothic Histories: Gender, History and the Gothic is an innovative new study of the ways in which women writers have used Gothic historical fiction to symbolise and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives.

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and human environments. Poverty also goes against the core values of democratic societies. Lotter talks about poverty in ways that depict this devastating human condition clearly. He shows why inequalities associated with poverty require our serious moral concern.

This book is the first to explore the work of the nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer Edward Pugh (1763-1813), a fascinating painter of the landscapes of North Wales and a brilliant observer of Welsh rural life.

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.

A political history of the south Wales miners, their industry and society, in a tumultuous period of crisis and struggle.

Welsh Gothic, the first study of its kind, introduces readers to the array of Welsh Gothic literature published from 1780 to the present day. Informed by postcolonial and psychoanalytic theory, it argues that many of the fears encoded in Welsh Gothic writing are specific to the history of Welsh people, telling us much about the changing ways in which Welsh people have historically seen themselves and been perceived by others. The first part of the book explores Welsh Gothic writing from its beginnings in the last decades of the eighteenth century to 1997. The second part focuses on figures specific to the Welsh Gothic genre who enter literature from folk lore and local superstition, such as the sin-eater, cwn Annwn (hellhounds), dark druids and Welsh witches.ContentsPrologue: 'A Long Terror'PART I: HAUNTED BY HISTORY1. Cambria Gothica (1780s-1820s)2. An Underworld of One's Own (1830s-1900s).3. Haunted Communities (1900s-1940s).4. Land of the Living Dead (1940s-1997).PART II: 'THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE CELTIC TWILIGHT'5. Witches, Druids and the Hounds of Annwn.6. The Sin-eaterEpilogue: Post-devolution GothicNotesSelect BibliographyIndex

This book analyses contemporary French films by focussing closely on cinematic representations of immigrants and residents of suburban housing estates known as banlieues. It begins by examining how these groups are conceived of within France's Republican political model before analysing films that focus on four key issues. Firstly, it will assess representations of undocumented migrants known as sans-papiers before then analysing depictions of deportations made possible by the controversial double peine law. Next, it will examine films about relations between young people and the police in suburban France before exploring films that challenge cliches about these areas. The conclusion assesses what these films show about contemporary French political cinema.IntroductionChapter One: Cinema and the RepublicChapter Two: T he Sans-papiers on Screen - Contextualising Immigrant Experiences in FilmChapter Three: Double peine: The Challenges of Mobilising Support for Foreign Criminals via CinemaChapter Four: C hallenging or Perpetuating Cliches? Young People and the Police in France's BanlieuesChapter Five: C hallenging Stereotypes about France's Banlieues by Shifting the Focus?ConclusionNotesFilmography and BibliographyIndex

Eirene White's The Ladies of Gregynog tells the story of Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, inheritors of great wealth at the end of the nineteenth century, and unique among their wealthy contemporaries in the early twentieth century. The two sisters devoted their large fortune to fostering the culture of their native Wales and, in 1920, acquired the Gregynog estate with the intention of establishing a craft commune. Today, almost a century later, Gregynog hall is a centre devoted to academic study, the revived Gregynog Press and a continuing tradition of music festivals in the fine setting of the estate gardens and arboretum. First published in 1985.

Y mwyaf gwreiddiol a thoreithiog o'n beirniaid llenyddol yw R. M. Jones, a ddisgrifiwyd yn ddiweddar fel yr unig feirniad o statws Ewropeaidd sy'n ysgrifennu yn Gymraeg.

Wales Says Yes provides the definitive account and analysis of the March 2011 Welsh referendum. Drawing on extensive historical research, the book explains the background to the referendum, why it was held and what was at stake. The book also explains how the rival Yes and No campaigns emerged, and the varying degree of success with which they functioned. Through a detailed account of the results, and analysis of survey evidence on Welsh voters, the book explains why Wales voted Yes in March 2011. Finally, it considers what that result may mean for the future of both Wales and the UK.

Presents the development of crime fiction in French cultures from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and explores the distinctive features of a French-language tradition.

Roland Mathias is a significant figure in the development of Welsh writing in English over the second half of the 20th century. This volume contains Roland Mathias's entire poetic output.

A study of the strange life and pathetic death of T.J. Llewelyn Prichard, the author of "Twm Sion Catti", the first Welsh novel in English which was popular enough to have been pirated in the mid-19th century.

Centres on the bombing of Getafe, a town south of Madrid shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This book establishes the importance of the Getafe incident and goes on to analyse "collateral damage" inflicted by air-forces on both sides during the war.

This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures.

This book presents original ethnographic research into the connections between childcare, family lives and social policy in Wales.

This collection of essays is aiming at capturing the rich and complex category of the "visual" both in Proust's novel itself (in its philosophical and stylistic implications) and beyond it, in other visual practices (cinema, painting, dance) inspired by the novel.

A unique and timely survey, by prominent academics and social campaigners, of the evolving priorities of the British welfare state, and the values which have underpinned it.