Books published by University of Wales Press

Explores the problematic, contested and changing relationship between nationality, ethnicity and the state in the United Kingdom. This study explores the ethnic margins and imperial dimensions of British national identity through the ceremonies of the Investiture of the Prince of Wales and the public reaction to them.

The study places the work of a major religious poet of the late twentieth century in a number of striking new perspectives that allow him to be viewed for the first time as an 'alternative' war poet, a conscience-stricken pacifist, a jealously opportunistic student of art, and an experimental biographer of the modern soul. Published to mark the centenary of the 'ogre of Wales', this volume deals with the idees fixes that serially possessed the fiercely intense imagination of R. S. Thomas: Iago Prytherch, Wales, his family and, of course, a vexingly elusive deity. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring Thomas's poetry into startling new relief. The war poetry is considered alongside the poet's early relationship to the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of the poetry's concerns; the intriguing 'secret code' of some of Thomas's Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems (including several hitherto unpublished) are brought centre-stage from the peripheries to which they have been routinely relegated.

This new selection of Anglophone Welsh poetry presents a range of literary responses to the French Revolution and the ensuing wars with France, a period in which Wales and its history became prime imaginative territory for poets of all political sympathies.

This collection of essays rediscovers and reassesses the extraordinary literary legacy of the border writer, Margiad Evans (1909-48) - novelist, poet, short story writer and autobiographer.

The book is the fifth and last volume of the series telling the story of Gwent/Monmouthshire to the end of the twentieth century - a century that saw the region's transformation by world war, social change, economic realignment, political reconfiguration and religious scepticism.

A critical examination of novels by Milan Kundera, Ian McEwan, Michel Houellebecq and J. M. Coetzee to explore aesthetically our understanding of different forms of identity, through the lens of classical and contemporary political, philosophical and social theory from within the Marxist aesthetic tradition.

A history of Welsh women's writing in both Welsh and English during the twentieth century. This book identifies and analyses a distinctive female literary tradition and reveals that Wales is represented very much as 'a different country' by its modern women writers.

'To Hell with Culture': Anarchism in Twentieth-Century British Literature explores the ways in which anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism made an impact in British twentieth-century literature.

Cultivating the Heart reveals the languages of feeling in a range of religious texts from the High Middle Ages.

Born in the village of Llangeinor, near Bridgend in south Wales, Richard Price (1723-91) was, to his contemporaries, an apostle of liberty, an enemy to tyranny and a great benefactor of the human race. His friend Benjamin Franklin described aspects of his work as 'the foremost production of human understanding that this century has afforded us'. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions, Price corresponded with the likes of Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Mirabeau and Condorcet. In November 1789 he publicly welcomed the start of the French Revolution and thus inspired not only Edmund Burke to write his rebuttal in Reflections on the Revolution in France, but also the Revolution Controversy, 'the most crucial ideological debate ever carried on in English'. Price also brought to world attention the Bayes-Price Theorem on probability, which is the invisible background to so much in modern life, and wrote a fundamental text on moral philosophy. Yet, despite all this and more, he remains little-known beyond academia, a situation that this biography helps to rectify. Liberty's Apostle tells his life story through his published works and, fully for the first time, his now published correspondence with a host of eighteenth century celebrities. The life revealed is of a truly remarkable Welshman and, as Condorcet remarked, of 'one of the formative minds' of the eighteenth century Enlightenment.

Women's Writing in Twenty-First Century France is the first book-length publication on women-authored literature of this period, and comprises a collection of challenging critical essays that engage with the themes, trends and issues, and with the writers and their texts, of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In Wales Unchained Daniel G. Williams explores how Welsh writers, politicians and intellectuals have defined themselves - and have been defined by others - since the early twentieth century. Whether by exploring ideas of race in the 1930s or reflecting on the metaphoric uses of boxing, asking what it means to inhabit the 'American century' or probing the linguistic bases of cultural identity, Williams writes with a rare blend of theoretical sophistication and accessible clarity. This book discusses Rhys Davies in relation to D. H. Lawrence, explores the simultaneous impact that Dylan Thomas and saxophonist Charlie Parker had on the Beat Generation in 1950s America, and juxtaposes the uses made of class and ethnicity in the thought of Aneurin Bevan and Paul Robeson. Transatlantic in scope and comparative in method, this book will engage readers interested in literature, politics, history and contemporary cultural debate.

The Gothic and the Carnivalesque in American Culture offers a new account of the American Gothic. Gothic studies, the field that explores horrid and frightful narratives, usually describes the genre as exploring genuine historical fears, crises and traumas, yet this does not account for the ways in which the genre is often a source of wicked delight as much as it is of horror - its audiences laugh as often as they shriek. This book traces the carnivalesque tradition in the American Gothic from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century. It discusses the festivals offered by Poe, Hawthorne and Irving; the celebrations of wickedness offered by the Weird Tales writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith; the curious aura attached to Ray Bradbury's stories; the way in which hosted horrors in comics and on television in the 1950s and 1960s taught their mass audiences how to read the genre; Stephen King's nurturing of a new audience for Gothic carnivals in the 1970s and 1980s; and the confluence of Gothic story and Goth subculture in the 1990s.Introduction: BallyhooChapter One: Theory, Practice and Gothic CarnivalChapter Two: 'The Delight of its Horror' - Poe's Carnivals and the Nineteenth-Century American GothicChapter Three: Weird Tales and Pulp SubjunctivityChapter Four: Ray Bradbury and the October AuraChapter Five: Hosted Horrors of the 1950s and 1960sChapter Six: Stephen King, Affect and the Real Limits of Gothic PracticeChapter Seven: Every Day is Halloween - Goth and the GothicConclusion: Waiting for the Great Pumpkin

Dyma lyfr arloesol gan arbenigwyr yn y maes, sy'n cynnig golwg ar rai o brif gysyniadau'r astudiaeth ar theatr a pherfformio dros y blynyddoedd diwethaf.

This book uses models of 'world literature' to present this 'quintessentially English' writer as a pioneering figure in an Anglophone Welsh literary tradition, a controversial reading that contributes to the present-day reconfiguration of cultural relations between Wales, England, Scotland

Examines from a variety of perspectives, and offers a range of interpretations, of the type of rhetoric associated with the anchoritic experience during the Middle Ages and draws conclusions on the many purposes of that rhetoric.

In R.S. Thomas - A Stylistic Biography, Daniel Westover traces Thomas's poetic development over six decades, demonstrating how the complex interior of the poet manifests itself in the continually shifting style of his poems.

The Island of Apples is a brilliant study of a pre-adolescent boy's romantic imagination and dangerous enthralment, set vividly in the south Wales of Methyr Tydfil and Carmarthen in the early twentieth century

A full-length study of Swansea's urban development from the late 18th to the late 19th century. It tells the story of how Swansea gained an unrivalled position of influence as an urban centre, which led it briefly to claim to be the 'metropolis of Wales', and how it lost this status in the face of rapid urban development elsewhere in the country.

A comprehensive study of medieval Arthurian literature, comprising of literary explorations together with chapters on the political and social manifestations of the Arthurian legend and the influence of continental romance traditions.

"A Social History of the Cinema in Wales" offers a perspective on the place of cinema in Welsh popular culture. The 'golden age' of cinema entertainment is now half a century behind us, yet it continues to linger in popular memory.