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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.

In this novel, Peredur defies both his mother's hostility and his brothers' lack of concern to seek out the truth of his father's death and to take part in a protest against the 1969 Investiture that goes violently wrong. Only at the end when Amy Parry faces death can reconciliation be achieved.

This volume covers aspects of Ludwig Wittgenstein's time in Swansea between 1942 and 1947. It considers his interaction with Rush Rhees, his stimulus for the Swansea School, and his broader influence on students, academics and a plethora of writers from a range of disciplines and interests. The contributors view Wittgenstein's philosophy and legacy from different perspectives, which include explanations and assessments of Wittgenstein's time and work at Swansea; historical and cultural scene setting; analyses of the Swansea School; literary comparisons; ideological evaluations; and a range of intimate reflections and commentaries. The volume editor additionally offers some psychogeographical observations in consideration of Wittgenstein's present-day significance to Swansea.

Intersectional analysis of the issue of migration in Wales. A Welcoming Nation? addresses current debates around migration in, from, and through Wales. It includes a range of migratory perspectives to better understand the diverse lived experiences of migrants, and the policies, measures, and approaches at work across various scales and sectors in Wales that shape their everyday lives. The volume adopts an intersectional approach to explore these experiences, which is central to understanding the multiple and complex ways in which exclusion and marginalization take place. To this end, the volume is not just a book about migration, but a way in which migratory experiences and statuses can intersect with other factors such as age, gender, race, and sexuality. This volume draws on new and emerging work to understand migration in Wales, including contributors from various career stages and different disciplines.

The first comprehensive architectural history of the work of Sir Percy Thomas and the significant British architecture firm that sustained his legacy into the twenty-first century. Sir Percy Thomas was the most important twentieth-century architect in Wales, renowned for interwar civic buildings such as Swansea Guildhall and the Temple of Peace in Cardiff. His architectural practice, Sir Percy Thomas & Son, designed much of the post-1945 welfare state and industry in Wales and beyond. In the late twentieth century, the Percy Thomas Partnership specialized in complex healthcare, industrial, and public buildings, becoming an international practice. This comprehensive, meticulously researched history examines the architecture of Percy Thomas in depth for the first time and explores its wider social and political significance. Arguing that the practice sustained an ethical approach to architecture as a national service for the benefit of society, this book gives new insights into the role of the architect and the changing relationships between the built environment and the state throughout the century. Its unique perspective from Wales promises to reshape our understanding of modern architecture.

What did medieval people call the animals they lived and worked with? Why did they give them the names they did? This book sets out to answer these questions. Drawing evidence from literary, documentary and material sources, it surveys the surviving evidence of pet-naming from the period, as well as examining the labels given to livestock and working animals, and the folk-names given to wild birds and beasts. Alongside building up a corpus of names, the conventions that directed animal naming in the Middle Ages are considered, as well as how proper nouns behaved when given to non-human organisms. Through its inquiry, the book lays bare the period's larger attitudes towards animals, their functions and identities, and at the same time sheds light on how the Middle Ages conceived the natural world as a whole and its relationship with human beings and their culture.

This is a historical and structural study of the Stalker Film. As a subcategory of the more general Slasher Film, the Stalker Film is often characterised by an off-screen presence that dominates the visual field, and by a recuring combination of character and plot functions. The Stalker Film responds to an ongoing cultural conflict narrativised as the fight to protect self and community, and does so within a specific 1978-81 historical period. As a postmodern work, the surface material of the Stalker Film alludes to past and ongoing cultural forms, to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, for example, to the theories of Sigmund Freud, or even to Laura Mulvey on the male gaze. These forms are not used to enlighten but are exploited to maximum visceral effect. Positioned at the rise of the Reagan era, the Stalker Film questions the Horror Film genre and engages a mass audience response.

This book is the first extended study of the importance of Gothic for an appreciation of the Brontës' writing. It resituates Gothic from the mode that gives the pleasing sensation of terror to being the source of the Brontës' deepest preoccupations - it is the mode they use to register anxieties and fears. This monograph, through a consideration of Gothic states and places, explores the Brontës' creative work with the genre. The author argues that to read the Brontës as Gothic poets and novelists is also to read them as post-Romantics, as they respond to the Gothic imaginations of such Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley. Gothic in the Brontës, then, is not merely a collection of tropes or even an aesthetic, but a way in which they read the world.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Factory Girl (1863) was a cheap serial intended for working-class readers. The sprawling plot centres on Laura Leslie and her daughter, Dora, who are the targets of a diverse cast of villains. After Laura's tragic death, Dora and her adoptive mother start a new life working in a cotton mill, but Dora's beauty attracts unwelcome attention, putting them in danger. Dora is the classic factory girl, a nineteenth-century revision of the Gothic heroine. Republished in the US in both newspapers and as a book, and translated into French, the novel has been out of print since the 1860s. This edition reproduces the original Halfpenny Journal text and illustrations, and adds a scholarly introduction placing the novel in numerous cultural contexts, including the rise of sensation fiction; nineteenth-century popular theatre; the transformation of the genre of the Gothic; and the backdrop of the Industrial Revolution.

This is the first monographic study of the Semanario Erudito, one of the most important of the erudite periodicals published in late eighteenth-century Spain. The goal of its editor, Antonio Valladares de Sotomayor (1737-1820), was to recover the history of Spain and make it available to his readers for them to learn, and learn from. The book begins with a discussion of Valladares's life and works, before presenting the history of his periodical - specifically, the process of requesting permission to publish it, who printed it, who sold it, and who read it. Documents from Spain's Archivo Histórico Nacional illuminate the censorship process undertaken by each work he wished to publish. The documents also show that the censors' concerns were often not ideological, and that they worked to facilitate the publication of documents they considered valuable but problematic. The second half of the book examines what Valladares published, and his reasons for doing so.

The work of the map-maker and historian Humphrey Llwyd (1527-68) were a crucial contribution to a new vision of Britain in the early modern period. It lies close to the roots of the emerging ideology of British Empire, and Llwyd's influence is to be found in the works of major English poets such as Edmund Spenser and Michael Drayton. His history of medieval Wales, Cronica Walliae, shaped Welsh historical traditions for centuries to come. Llwyd is also the earliest extant source for the legend of Prince Madoc, whose twelfth-century voyage to America shaped British fantasies of the New World from the reign of Elizabeth to the nineteenth century. This is the first book-length study of Llwyd's works, influence and intellectual milieu, and contributions from scholars in the fields of history, geography and literary studies cover the range of Llwyd's achievement as a cartographer, historian and chorographer of Wales and Britain.

This book draws on data gathered during eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the Chubut Province of Patagonia, Argentina. It focuses on the formation of Welsh subjectivity through sight and sound, seeking to unpack the multiple and multisensory ways in which identity is constructed in this context. The chapters analyse a series of encounters, in choir rehearsals, the Eisteddfod and in film nights, to consider the usefulness and limitations of theoretical concepts that have been developed and used to theorise the self. This is a book about power, music, tourism and the self. It argues that the creation of Welshness in Y Wladfa was not only explicitly foregrounded in performances for tourists under an imagined Welsh gaze, but also for a Welsh ear, with subjectivities created and re-created through musical encounters. It is the first anthropological monograph of its kind that provides an insight into the significance of music in the Welsh Patagonian context.

Which Welsh woman led a double life as a pirate and smuggler? Which harpist and wrestler threw a man into a lake? Who led the first society in Wales to campaign for women to vote? Discover 366 surprising and intriguing entries about women from Wales and connected to Wales, from the daring to the dastardly, from the ingenious to inspiring. This essential daily reference offers an eclectic mix of biographies and notable achievements of women who have made a significant contribution to Wales, including women from the worlds of history, entertainment, sports, politics, racial awareness, LGBTQ+, disability awareness, music, television and much more. Full of surprising stories, quirky facts and notorious individuals, this collection from the authors of Wales on This Day: 366 Facts You Probably Didn't Know is an informative and entertaining testament to women who have shaped Wales and the world.

Grief faces all of us in the end. This collection explores how poets have expressed and attempted to come to some kind of understanding of this universal but often under-discussed emotion.   M. Wynn Thomas explores how each poet gives full, unbridled expression of their pain, before moving towards a resolution that places the experience of grief in a consolingly meaningful context.  Covering subjects from the loss of a loved one to the death of a language, from the medieval period to the present day, this powerful collection sheds light on the pain of loss and the search for meaning and even hope in it. To those of us walking through grief and loss, these poems offer a guiding hand.

An annotated edition of Leon Modena's Hebrew Musar book Tsema? Tsaddik ('Pious Plant'), originally published in Venice in 1600. Tsema? Tsaddik follows the format of a medieval Physiologus, where each chapter corresponds to a specific animal and addresses various human behaviors, traits, vices or virtues. Additionally, each chapter features an explanation of its theme, evidenced by quotes from the Old Testament, Greek and Roman philosophers, Rabbinic Sages and fathers of the Church - along with at least one folktale. The translation is accompanied by a thorough and comprehensive introduction to describe the world of Musar pre-modern books, and offers insights into Modena's cultural context.

The four writers of this study - Norah Lange, Silvina Ocampo, Estela Canto and Silvina Bullrich - are rarely considered together. Each, however, made their literary start within the close-knit circles dominated by Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in the mid-twentieth century. The title of the book plays with the double meaning of the word 'against' - signifying 'opposed' or 'resistant', but also 'touching' or 'supported by'. In each case, the four writers benefited from early support from Borges, before eventually finding their own voices different from his as well as from each other's. These writers struggled as much as their nineteenth-century counterparts to find ways to represent in fiction a particularly feminine subjectivity, and this study recognises their similarities as well as their originality. Most importantly, it seeks to undo misperceptions about these writers that have persisted to the present day, particularly regarding their individual paths through the fraught politics of Argentina's twentieth century.

This study presents a cultural rather than the usual history of the French invasion of Pembrokeshire in 1797, using primary sources both in English and Welsh to debate of how the invasion was remembered and assess its historical and cultural imprint. What is now known as 'the last invasion of Britain' terrorised the people in and around Fishguard - but the French surrendered, more as a result of their own indiscipline and the fury of local people than any French military shortcomings. Almost immediately, stories of women in red livery appeared in propaganda and travel accounts, and subsequently acts of individual heroism would be associated above all with Jemima Nicholas. The telling and retelling of this story peaked at times of fear of invasion and war - be it against Napoleon, the Kaiser or Hitler - and, resilient to public doubt and professional scorn, the 'legend' of the women survived into popular memory.

Exhuming and reanimating an obscure ancient cunning associated with the monstrous, the hybrid, the feminine and the nonhuman, this study proposes a novel transdisciplinary framework for analysing Gothic media and discourse through the lens of metis. Metis denotes a wily, adaptive intelligence shared by tricksters, humans, nonhumans and objects, characterised by shapeshifting, twists and duplicity - it is also an artful praxis for blurring categories, embracing multiplicity, navigating difference and subverting authority. Using metis as both theme and method, Gothic Metis weaves together myth, literature, rhetorical theory and critical posthumanism, to analyse Gothic character and narration from the nineteenth century to the present while developing a post-anthropocentric praxis for representing, navigating and ultimately subverting the Anthropocene. Reading Gothic alongside and through metis-and metis alongside and through Gothic-this book highlights the Gothic mode as a timely, artful response to the rise of the Anthropocene, rendering a post-anthropocentric world beyond Man.

From the outbreak of war in 1914 to the creation of the Mercantile Marine Reserve and the eventual introduction of convoys in 1917, this book charts the experiences, contribution and sacrifices made by merchant mariners from Wales. During the First World War, merchant crew faced the dangers of mines, U-boats and commerce raiders in the course of moving the goods, men and materials that were vital for victory. The outcomes of such encounters are examined within a broader context of the diversity of vessels, trades and prevailing working conditions. This study also includes important new insights into the participation of both women and minority-group seafarers in the mercantile marine. Using a wide range of evidence drawn from contemporary newspaper reports, ships' crew agreements and official papers, the multi-faceted world of civilian mariners caught up in the war at sea is revealed.

Inspired by decolonial thinking, this book challenges romantic images of Y Wladfa, the Welsh Patagonian settlement founded in 1865. Drawing on archival sources written in Spanish, Welsh and English, it exposes the complex human relationships of this settler colony, and in particular disrupts the myth of Welsh-Indigenous friendship by foregrounding Indigenous experience and revealing less familiar accounts in the record. A newly-developed framework applies three logics - possession, racialization/barbarisation, and assimilation - to make sense of settler colonialism in Patagonia and to debate Wales's complex position as both colonised and coloniser. A new analysis of contemporary cultural products (television, film, textbooks) further demonstrates how the romantic view continues to shape racial stereotypes today, concluding that such settler origin countries as Wales are vital sites of decolonial debate.

In the early years of the Victorian era, men in Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire and Cardiganshire rebelled against the imposition of tolls on the roads they travelled while making their living. In a mass protest movement, they dressed themselves in dramatic and colourful costumes, and led by the enigmatic figure of 'Rebecca', they attacked symbols of injustice, redistributed wealth, and clashed with both local authorities and the national government. These events, which became known as the Rebecca riots, provide a compelling story of successful direct action. But they were also a broader uprising of communities across Wales against a wide range of financial, social and political pressures. In Rebecca's Country, historian Rhian E. Jones explores the background, chronology and achievements of the movement, and the glimpse that it gives into the lives of ordinary people and how they responded to the sweeping and severe changes of the early nineteenth century, telling the human stories behind this fascinating history.

In this extraordinary memoir, Gwyneth Lewis, the inaugural National Poet of Wales, recounts her toxic upbringing at the hands of her controlling, coercive mother. It is a book that Gwyneth has been preparing to write all her life, in diaries that she's kept since childhood. In these journals, she interrogates the emotionally abusive mother/daughter relationship, in great pain but determined to find a way through. The result is a book that Gwyneth co-writes with her younger self, an unexpected and life-saving dialogue through time. Metaphors of haunting intensity help her confront what happened to her; quotations from art and literature help to guide and steady her. Nightshade Mother is a book about the power of art, language and, ultimately, about homecoming after a lifetime of exile from herself. It is a profoundly moving and beautiful work; questing, forgiving and loving in its approach.

Russ Williams was raised on Wales's stories, like the one about a mountain that would send you mad or turn you into a gifted poet if you camped out on it, the one about the lost civilisation drowned by the sea and the one about the bottomless lake leading down to the Welsh Otherworld. Stories of witches and giants and heroic kings, dragons and mad doctors, ghostly women, giant beaver monsters, vampire furniture and pirate-fighting monks. As entertaining as it is informative, Where the Folk follows Russ Williams as he travels in Griff, his creaky red Fiesta, in search of places associated with Wales's legends, folklore and urban myths. In this joyful travelogue, not only does Russ recount some of Wales's most interesting stories; he also explores the origins behind the myths, talking to experts and storytellers to find out how and why they might have come about, and what they tell us about Wales past and present.

Un o dadau cenedlaetholdeb modern yw Emrys ap Iwan (1848-1906), y pregethwr Methodist o Ddyffryn Clwyd. Hon yw'r gyfrol gyntaf arno sy'n dadansoddi'n fanwl seiliau beiblaidd a chrefyddol ei weledigaeth. Mae'n cloriannu ei gefndir a'i fagwraeth, ei addysg yng Ngholeg y Bala ac ar y cyfandir, y dylanwadau Ewropeaidd arno, a'r modd yr aeth ati i ddwyn perswâd ar ei gyfoeswyr i ymwrthod â'r bydolwg Prydeinig a Seisnig. Ceir yn ei homilïau athrawiaeth Gristnogol aeddfed a gwâr, wedi'i mynegi mewn Cymraeg rhywiog ac yn gyfraniad arhosol i feddwl y genedl; mae'r cysyniadau o ras, gobaith a gogoniant yn cael lle blaenllaw. Yn ogystal ? thrafod ei gyd-destun hanesyddol, mae'r gyfrol hefyd yn tanlinellu gwreiddioldeb gwaith Emrys ac yn pwysleisio'i berthnasedd i'r Gymru gyfoes.

A consideration of literary geography as a specialist academic field. Interspatiality is a book about the language, theory, and practice of literary geography that takes as its subject matter the inseparability of writing, reading, and living. It explores ways of engaging with interrelated textual-social-spatial processes, working with the problem of how to appreciate these processes as inseparable; how to articulate the complex spatialities they generate; and how to convey their presence, power, and significance in literary texts. By focusing on literary geography as something inhabited as well as studied, it draws attention to the interspatiality of routine daily life.