Books published by University of Wales Press

A brand new Pocket Guide which charts the concise history of sport in Wales since 1800. The book locates the character and structure of sport within the wider social, political and economic context that shaped it.

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.

Challenges the critical view that Gothic is a vehicle for anti-Catholic, anticlerical sentiment. This book appeals the view that the Catholic motifs contained in Gothic novels (monks, nuns, abbeys, confessionals) signify anti-Catholic prejudice and anti-Church subversiveness on the part of the author and the audience.

First printed in 2001 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, this book has been out of print for several years and is highly sought after by researchers in the field of Medieval cultural studies. "e;Double Agents"e; was the first book length study of women in Anglo-Saxon written culture that took on board the insights of contemporary critical theory, especially feminist theory, in order to elucidate the complex challenges of both the absence and presence of women in the historical record. That is to say, unlike the two earlier books on women in this period (by Fell, 1984, and by Chance, 1986), this is not a book about only those women in the written record (whether we think of it as historical or literary) of Anglo-Saxon England, it also tackles the question of how the feminine is modelled, used, and metaphorised in Anglo-Saxon texts, even when women themselves are absent.This book spans the entire Anglo-Saxon period from Aldhelm and Bede in the earliest centuries to Alfric and the anonymous homilists and hagiographers of the later tenth and eleventh centuries; it draws on Anglo-Saxon vernacular texts as well as Latin ones, and on those works most familiar to literary scholars (such as the "e;Exeter Book Riddles"e; or "e;Cadmon's Hymn"e;, the first so-called poem in English, or the female "e;Lives of Saints"e;) as well as historians (wills, charters, the cult of relics); it deliberately reconsiders, from the perspective of gender and women's agency, some of the key conceptual issues that studying Anglo-Saxon England presents (the relation of orality to literacy; that of poetry and sanctity to belief; and, the cultural significance of names, naming, and metaphors in Anglo-Saxon writing).

This book examines the relationship between aesthetics and politics based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925 - 1995) and Pierre-Felix Guattari (1930 - 1992), most famous for their collabarative works Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980).Porter analyses the relationship between art and social-political life and considers in what ways the aesthetic and political connect to each other. Deleuze and Guattari believed that political theory can have aesthetic form and that vice versa, the arts can be thought to be forms of political theory. Deleuze and Guattari force us to confront the idea that 'art', the things we call language, literature, painting and architecture, always has the potential to be political because naming, or language-use, implies a shaping or ordering of the 'political' as such, rather than its re-presentation.

This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare.

Brings together the interpretations of the Wohunge Group from scholars working on the fields of medieval spirituality, gender, and the anchoritic tradition, providing literary, theological, linguistic, and cultural context for the works associated with the Wohunge Group. This book discusses and explains the impact of these works.

Why, at a time when the majority of us no longer believe in ghosts, demons or the occult, does Gothic continue to have such a strong grasp upon literature, cinema and popular culture? This book answers the question by exploring some of the ways in which we have applied Gothic tropes to our everyday fears. The book opens with The Turn of the Screw, a text dealing in the dangers adults pose to children whilst simultaneously questioning the assumed innocence of all children. Staying with the domestic arena, it explores the various manifestations undertaken by the haunted house during the twentieth century, from the bombed-out spaces of the blitz ('The Demon Lover' and The Night Watch) to the designer bathrooms of wealthy American suburbia (What Lies Beneath). The monsters that emerge through the uncanny surfaces of the Gothic can also be terror monsters, and after a discussion of terrorism and atrocity in relation to burial alive, the book examines the relationship between the human and the inhuman through the role of the beast monster as manifestation of the evil that resides in our midst (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Birds). It is with the dangers of the body that the Gothic has been most closely associated and, during the later twentieth century, paranoia attaches itself to skeletal forms and ghosts in the wake of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Sexuality and/as disease is one of the themes of Patrick McGrath's work (Dr Haggard's Disease and 'The Angel') and the issue of skeletons in the closet is also explored through Henry James's 'The Jolly Corner'. However, sexuality is also one of the most liberating aspects of Gothic narratives. After a brief discussion of camp humour in British television drama series Jekyll, the book concludes with a discussion of the apparitional lesbian through the work of Sarah Waters.

A comprehensive guide to the most important church and chapel buildings in Wales from the early middle ages to the present day. Introduced with an overview of the religious history of the country, this book explores and illustrates Wales's surviving churches and chapels by region.

Explores the link between logic, ethics and political theory. This book analyses the theoretical origins and application of the concept of intersubjectivity, arguing that post-Kantian philosophy (in Fichte, Schiller and Hegel) extends Kant's critique of Leibniz to yield a different theory of modern freedom, community and mutual recognition.

Offers a narrative of a period when a group of Welshmen declared war on England with gelignite and fire bombs. This work focuses on the role of two main protagonists of Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC), the Movement for the Defence of Wales, Owen Williams and John Jenkins.

Ranging from the nineteenth-century to the present, this book explores several central aspects of the ways in which the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales has responded to what was, for a crucial period of a century or so, the dominant culture of Wales: the culture of Welsh Nonconformity. In the introduction, the author reflects on why no sustained attempt has hitherto been made to investigate one of the formative cultural influences on modern 'Anglo-Welsh' literature, the Nonconformist inheritance. The importance of addressing this strange and significant cultural deficit is then explained, and a preliminary attempt made to capture something of the spirit of Welsh Nonconformity. The succeeding chapters address and seek to answer such questions as: What exactly did the Welsh chapels believe and do? Why have the English-language writers of Wales, from Caradoc Evans and Dylan Thomas to R.S. Thomas and the authors of today, been so fascinated by them? How accurate are the impressions we've been given of chapel life and chapel people in the English-language poetry and fiction of Wales? The answers offered may alter our views both of the Welsh Nonconformist past and of Welsh writing in English. One of the ideas advanced is that many of Wales' most important writers went to war with the preachers in their texts, and that their work is therefore the site of cultural struggle. Theirs was a war in words waged to determine who would have the last word on modern Welsh experience.

This book explores in detail the novels written by Emyr Humphreys during a timespan of over fifty years, from his first, A Little Kingdom, published in 1946, to The Gift of a Daughter, published in 1998. An early chapter comprises a literary biography with the following chapters devoted to: the early novels including A Toy Epic; a separate examination of Outside the House of Baal, considered by many to be his finest achievement; his use of Celtic myth as a patterning device; similarly his use of Welsh history is covered in 2 chapters; and finally his use of various postcolonial strategies. It also contains an extensive bibliography of work by and about Emyr Humphreys.

A study of the early modern period, from the creation of Monmouthshire by the Act of Union in 1536 to the beginnings of industrialization in the later eighteenth century. It explores the social concerns of this period, including the growth of urbanity and the commercial world, education, poverty and civil war, as well as religion and politics.

Kant on Sublimity and Morality provides an argument to the essential moral significance of the Kantian sublime and situates this argument within the history of the relationship between sublimity and morality.

Prior to its incorporation into France in 1532, the Breton Dukes maintained Brittany's independence as a Celtic nation first established by Nomenoe in the 9th century. Written in an accessible style, this book presents a useful introduction to Brittany for students of French and Breton history, as well as Celtic Studies.

'Modernism from the Margins' is an account of the 1930s writing of two of the most popular authors of the time. Locating the work of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas historically, the book questions standard accounts of the period as Auden-dominated and offers a theoretical account of the engagement of both writers with the varieties of Modernism.

Provides an introduction to "Ancrene Wisse", one of the most important works in English of the thirteenth century. This book offers a fresh contextualisation which engages with the history of lay piety and vernacular spirituality in the Middle Ages.

Demonstrates how religion and faith have informed Welsh national identity from the seventeenth century, touching upon the Puritan period, the Older Dissent of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century Nonconformity and the impact of secularism during the twentieth century.

Brittany presents a paradox: the region was incorporated into France in 1532, yet, over the years, signs of a sense of separation from France are growing clearer. This work provides an introduction to identity politics in Brittany, analysing its special status within France: the region that is a potential rival centre to Paris.

Sheds light on the religious women of medieval Wales. Drawing on a wide range of sources from saints' lives and native poetry to holy wells and visual evidence, the volume explores feminine sanctity, its meanings, manifestations and related iconography in a specifically Welsh context.

Uwe Timm is one of the influential writers in contemporary German literature. His work addresses the dominant cultural themes in contemporary Germany, including memory, biography and Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. This book looks at his work.

This book examines issues of sex and society in early twentieth-century Spain, with particular emphasis on eugenics and the sex reform movement. As a central narrative thread it uses the specific case history of Hildegart Rodriquez (1914-33), a 'eugenic' child who came to be one of the central players in the Spanish chapter of the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) and was made tragically famous when murdered by her mother. In the last two years of her life Hildegart was in correspondence with the English sexologist Havelock Ellis. Her letters to him, reproduced in the appendix, provide a unique source for understanding the WLSR in Spain, its complexities, and its relationship to similar movements elsewhere in Europe. The letters also make it possible to glimpse in poignant and dramatic detail the personal tensions and anxieties in the life of this young woman that was brought to such a premature end.

This book explores the paradox that the Gothic (today's werewolves, vampires, and horror movies) owe their origins (and their legitimacy) to eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare..

Focuses on the subject of 'melancholy madness' in Spain. This work demonstrates that the subject of melancholy in the Spanish Golden Age is an indispensable link in a chain which may help us to understand the appearance of sadness and malcontent in Europe at the dawn of modernity.