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After Dunkirk the British Army was broken, the country isolated and invasion imminent. German Military Intelligence was sat the task of recruiting collaborators from among Welsh nationalists to sabotage military and civilian installations ahead of the landing. Strategic deception was one of the few weapons left. To fool the Germans into believing Britain was ready and able to repel invaders when in fact it had only the weapons salvaged from Dunkirk, MI5 invented an imaginary cell of Welsh saboteurs led by a retired police inspector.

Examines the use of metaphors of monstrosity and the place of the dead in political theory, specifically in relation to conservatism, Marxism and fascism.

What does ‘home’ mean? Is it where you come from, or is it somewhere that you have to create for yourself, building brick by brick on the ruins and treasures of everything that has gone before? In this compelling memoir, Gosia Buzzanca tells the story of a young woman who leaves Poland at the age of nineteen in search of a bigger life, hoping to leave the traumas of her teenage years behind her. After studying in England, she finds a rich new tapestry of experience awaiting her in Wales, with intertwined threads of love and literature, hope and despair. Motherhood brings new joys, but the pain of the past must be faced before this new life by the seaside can truly feel like home.  With the fearless honesty of a poet, Gosia offers her account of an extraordinary ordinary life where every flavour is tasted, every moment lived to its fullest. This story of a lifelong quest for home will call to anyone who has ever felt lost or incomplete, and who yearns to find a place where they belong.

The elemental pull of water is irresistible, whether it’s to bathe, swim, shower, splash about, sail or simply paddle. We are drawn to it not just for pleasure but for its healing and wellbeing benefits. Destinations, from holy wells to mysterious lakes and enchanted rivers, also have spiritual meaning and are shrouded in myths and folklore. In The Water Remedy, Clare Gogerty offers a guide to some of the best places in the UK to enjoy being with water, inspiring us to see beyond its day-to-day domestic use so that we can benefit from its spiritual and restorative powers.Discover the difference that our rivers and seas, lakes and springs, wells and waterways can all make to our wellbeing

Galicia, a non-state nation in north-west Spain, has often been portrayed as a sentimental nation, a misty land of poets and legends. This book offers the first study of this trope as a feminizing, colonial stereotype that has marked Galician cultural history since the late nineteenth century. Through a close reading of the main texts of Galician literary history, the author shows how this trope has helped sustain the unequal power relation between Galicia and the Spanish State. As a consequence, questions of masculinity, morality and respectability have played an essential role in Galicia's national construction, thereby enforcing a masculine definition and limiting the role of women. This book argues for a revision of the main texts of Galician cultural nationalism through a gender and postcolonial perspective, showing that contemporary portrayals of Galician history are dependent on the politically debilitating trope of Galician sentimentality.

Building on previous zombie studies scholarship, this ghoulish collection examines how the undead reflect and contribute to contemporary social anxieties, particularly in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The contributors to this volume advance the theoretical framework of ‘zombiism’ through four interconnected themes – journeys, bodies, pandemics and politics – and their writings analyse diverse media representations of zombies across literature, film, television and material culture, offering new perspectives on how zombie narratives engage issues of travel restrictions, political breakdowns, racial tensions and sexual taboos. By bringing together scholars from various fields, the volume demonstrates the continuing relevance of zombies as a lens for understanding contemporary societal challenges, from public health crises to rising far-right politics and ongoing culture wars; its interdisciplinary approach not only enriches zombie studies but also reveals how the figure of the zombie remains a vital tool for analysing pressing issues in the humanities and beyond.

Interspatiality is a book about the language, theory and practice of a 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. With a focus on literary geography as something inhabited as well as studied, the book draws attention to the interspatiality of routine daily life – a mundane literary geography – in surroundings that are made up of the real and imagined, of stories as well as locations, storied locations and located stories.

When one thinks about medieval animals, snails rarely come to mind. Just as history has long had its biases, so has the study of animals – both have long focused on the ‘crowned heads’. A focus on the seemingly insignificant, on the small and the frail, offers a fresh point of view. This book studies the uses and representations of medieval snails, spanning material culture, medicine and gastronomy as well as a great variety of texts and images – taking into consideration bestiaries, sermons, poems and insults, as well as marginalia, sculpture, paintings and painted ceilings. Observing the Middle Ages from the viewpoint of a snail can be surprising, and lead us to delve into material everyday life as well as the core of culture-building. This study concludes with a novel reading of the famed ‘snail-combat motif’, in which a knight cowers faced with a ferocious mollusc, making a connection between Gothic marginalia and a new, most malleable cultural expression: the meme.

Christoph Hein is widely regarded as one of the most important writers to emerge from the former GDR. This volume contains an interview with Hein, a previously unpublished prose piece by him, an up-to-date biography and critical articles which examine individual texts in detail.

A collection of 13 varied articles by renowned scholars dealing with various aspects of literature, in particular the relationship between literature and technology, from the early days of printing to the present where revolutionary changes in technology provide a means of spreading literature to other popular cultural forms.

Ideology draws on the social, political and cultural theory of Jurgen Habermas, Gilles Deleuze and Slavoj i ek in order to explore the possibility of developing a 'critical conception of ideology'. The book is concerned with two main themes: the relationship of ideology to the 'real' and the relationship between ideology and the 'ethical'. Although these three writers are often assumed to have little in common, Porter demonstrates a formal homology between them by showing that they all offer an idea of critique that pivots around two central intuitions. Firstly, they insist that a substantive critical distinction can be drawn between the ideological and the real. And, secondly, Habermas, Deleuze and i ek all offer an image of ideology critique that is importantly grounded on ethical terms. By engaging, among other things, with Habermas's sociological work on the public sphere, i ek's forays into popular culture, and Deleuze's analysis of political cinema, Ideology strives to concretely animate how each of these figures provide the critical tools necessary to challenge the kinds of ideological practice that pervade the contemporary social world.

This collection of essays discusses some of the problems faced when editing women. The authors discussed include Virginia Woolf and Katherine Philips.

This book offers a structural and longue durée analysis of Wales, Catalonia, the Mezzogiorno, and Padania, as regional configurations of the capitalist world-system. Rejecting methodological nationalism, it examines how these regions were historically produced through conquest, incorporation, dependency, accumulation, and uneven development within both state structures and global economic processes. Rather than treating them as autonomous ‘stateless nations’, the book analyses their political tensions, economic roles and cultural trajectories as outcomes of their relational position in the world-system. It traces how centralisation, resource extraction, administrative restructuring and differentiated economic functions have shaped their long-term development. Integrating political economy, territorial governance, historical sociology and comparative history, it reveals how modern states are built from internally differentiated regions whose conflicting roles are integral to the reproduction of capitalism. Through deep comparative analysis across centuries, the book illuminates how internal national questions persist, not as anomalies, but as structural features of capitalist modernity.

This is the first comprehensive account of the two decisive centuries in Welsh history which followed the defeat of Owain Glyn Dwr in 1415. In the process, surprising features emerge. The fifteenth century, the `Cinderella' of Welsh history, is seen as one of resilience and recovery from the protracted and destructive Glyn Dwr rebellion, and of the emergence of ruling gentry families, natives and settlers.The Tudor Act of Union in 1536-43 swept away the outmoded lumber of medieval times and reorientated the country. It confirmed strikingly royal authority and gentry domination but along lines that had long been anticipated. The Renaissance and the Reformation posed not only perils but opportunities. Responding to the challenge with vigour and imagination, Welsh scholars and patriots met with marked,if not complete, success. The Welsh remained prouder and more conscious of their Welshness than has usually been thought. This was an age of outstanding personalities and achievements, as impressive as they were diverse: Owain Glyn Dwr and Henry Tudor; Guto'r Glyn and John Dee; William Herbert and Robert Devereux; Sion Cent and William Morgan; Mathew Gough and Robert Mansel.Particular attention is given to the literature of the age, Welsh and English, prose and verse, to illustrate all aspects of a robust, colourful, and formative era.

A facsimilie copy of his most influential work by Morgan Llwyd (1619-1659), being a powerful and multi-layered allegory in the form of a conversation between three birds - an eagle, a raven and a dove - which represent the State, the Established Church and the Puritans. First published in 1653, the facsimilie is taken from the Guild of Graduates's edition of the work.

A translation of Sophocles's play Electra, from the Greek into Welsh. Electra tells the story of the revenge Orestes and Electra take on their mother, Clytemnestra, for the murder of their father Agamemnon, after he returns from the Trojan War. Reprint; first published in January 1984.

At the present day the science of geology is being studied more thoroughly and by more people than ever before, its advance has never been more significant. Obviously it is of the first importance that its nomenclature and terminology - growing all the time - should be clearly understood and appreciated; yet it is just here that study and publication have not kept up with the general progress. A book of this kind is therefore needed, and the present one has claims to be a pioneer. Some fifteen hundred names and terms have been carefully selected for critical consideration, a special feature being the copious quotations and references which are scattered over the whole field of geological literature (chiefly British), ancient and modern. Many of the more significant works in the history of British geology are thus brought into prominence. The "Dictionary" is meant not so much for occasional reference or for the seeking of the meaning of every out-of-way word; its aim, rather, is to be useful companion', ever ready for consultation and for the provoking of lines of thought and investigation.

Welsh Surnames is the first full-scale study of Welsh surnames and is both a classification and a dictionary. Based on Welsh, Latin and English texts, on parish registers and local histories, it traces the growth of a Welsh surnaming pattern in Wales and the Border at the end of the Middle Ages. This historical picture is completed by evidence taken from modern sources such as electoral registers from Wales and western England, surnames from Welsh and London newspapers, and telephone directories.The book opens with a classification of the various kinds of Welsh surnames besides the innumerable examples of the well-known Welsh patronymic surname; surnames from hypocoristic forms, from anglicisations and approximations of Welsh names, from the forenames of women, from place-names, and many others. This is followed by a dictionary of Welsh surnames which also gives attention to variations and corruptions of the original names. Welsh Surnames is aimed both at the specialist and the general reader as an invaluable tool not only for the historian or the genealogist but also the geographer and sociologist.

Christine Pagnoulle's commentary provides a detailed study of eight among David Jones's more accessible poems: those pieces in fact which he reluctantly detached from his work-in-progress and released for publication between 1955 and his death in 1974. It elucidates difficult passages, relates them to his other works, whether poems, essays, or drawings, and shows how David Jones's vision of the world in the middle of our century bears on our present concerns. While developing orignal interpretations this commentary also integrates previous critical approaches into a comprehensive overview. It will thus be welcome reading for specialists of David Jones's poetry, and will also be of interest to those readers who are discovering or still have to discover his work.

The story of an ambitious Norman-Welsh priest who wrote, often angrily and always vividly, about his troubles and about the people and places he knew. His books provide the most detailed evidence and the shrewdest insights we have into twelfth century Wales, its social customs, its agriculture, its leading figures and its religious life.

Gerald's own testimony is used extensively in this book to introduce various themes from medieval life, especially in relation to Wales. The book looks at twelfth-century Wales - its land and society, the Norman invasion of Ireland, the Third Crusade, the troubled reign of Henry II and the Welsh Church. Gerald himself was a vitally important figure in the story of the Welsh Church at this time.

The second volume of a dictionary of the Welsh language. It presents in alphabetical order the vocabulary of the Welsh language from the remnants of old Welsh, through the abundant literature of the Mediaval and modern periods.To order parts of the Second Edition visit our Librarians page.

Gwent is sometimes presented as the most Anglicized county of Wales. This book corrects the perspective by tracing the Welsh cultural tradition of the county. The author recounts the work of the Cymreigyddion Society of the mid-1800s; the contribution of Gwent's poets, authors and publishers; and the events of the National Eisteddfodau held in Newport (1897), Abergavenny (1913), Pontypool (1924), and Ebbw Vale (1958). Finally, she discusses the language and culture in Gwent today.