You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Published in the centenary year of Ben Bowen's death, this is the first extended, dispassionate account of the life and work of the Treorci-born poet. When Bowen died aged twenty-four in 1903, the Welsh literary establishment predicted his immortality. Yet, just a generation later, he had become little more than a footnote in the history of nineteenth-century poetry. In this study, Robin Chapman reveals Bowen's short-lived fame and subsequent obscurity as a product both of Bowen's precocious sense of himself as a great poet and of a Wales that fed that assumption. He traces Bowen's escape from a miner's life in the Rhondda, his stay in South Africa during the Boer War, his talent for controversy and his growing awareness of his impending death. Through a consideration of the life and work of this compelling character, Robin Chapman also enhances our understanding of Welsh culture in late-Victorian and early-Edwardian Wales.
For decades, accusations have been made that senior figures among Welsh nationalists were sympathetic towards Fascism during the 1930s and the Second World War – such accusations that would sully the name of any political adversary. In this challenging work, Wales’s most prominent political commentator assesses the truth of the historical charges, shedding new light on aspects of Plaid Cymru and its leadership during the period in question, and bringing into the open an important discussion on the political culture of contemporary Wales.
For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the ...
Combines historical and contemporary material. Draws on historical, sociological, cultural and literary approaches. Full revised and up-to-date edition of a classic book in the field. Covers the whole field in one volume.
Opens up a period in Welsh cultural history that has been almost completely overlooked First monograph to explore Welsh history between 1890-1914
While electorally weak, the Communist Party of Great Britain and its Welsh Committee was a constant feature of twentieth century Welsh politics, in particular through its influence in the trade union movement. Based on original archival research, the present volume offers the first in-depth study of the Communist Party’s attitude to devolution in Wales, to Welsh nationhood and Welsh identity, as well as examining the party’s relationship with the Labour Party, Plaid Cymru and the labour and nationalist movements in relation to these issues. Placing the party’s engagement of these issues within the context of the rapid changes in twentieth century Welsh society, debates on devolution an...
The book is the first overview of the long distinguished career of Wales’ leading Welsh-language novelist in its entirety. • A study of Emyr Humphreys who has had a remarkable career spanning over seventy years as a writer, he has published more than two dozen novels (many of them prize-winning), as well as several collection of short stories. • These essays were supplemented by the interviews the author conducted with Emyr Humphreys.
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.
This book will provide an educational and entertaining read. It will explain the contradictions and complexities of the Welsh national identity. This book will reveal the hardships and horrors of some people's lives. It will reveal how religion and superstition ebbed and flowed together.
Since the time of Freud, some of the most radical innovators within critical theory have stressed the importance of the body and its representation to the constitution of subjectivity. This book explores some of the theoretical debates surrounding the body, and assesses its value as a critical concept, through an analysis of the body’s representation both in Welsh literary texts in English, and discourse about Wales more generally. Combining psychoanalytic with more culturally orientated approaches to the body, the book offers an historically informed account of the body that analyses its role in the construction and contestation of identity at a cultural as well as individual level, contributing in a new and radical way to the rapidly expanding critical literature concerned with exploring the construction of identity in a Welsh cultural context.