University of Chicago Press: New Titles from 'University of Wales Press'

Poverty, Ethics and Justice

H. P. P. [Hennie] Lötter — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Poverty violates fundamental human values through its impact on individuals and on human environments, and it goes against the core values of democratic societies. Drawing on numerous scientific studies as well as his own experience witnessing the systematic poverty in his home country of South Africa, H. P. P. [Hennie] Lötter presents a holistic profile of poverty and its effects on human lives all the while accounting for the complexity of each individual case. He argues that shared ethical values must guide the planning and distribution of aid and that our society must reevaluate our notions of justice and reimagine the role of the state in order to enable collective human responsibility for poverty’s successful eradication.

Environmental Law and Policy in Wales

Patrick Bishop; Mark Stallworthy — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Environmental Law and Policy in Wales addresses key law and policy issues that have arisen over the last several years in Wales in response to the changing climate. Editors Patrick Bishop and Mark Stallworthy bring together leading members of the Welsh environmental law academy to deliberate on the development of environmental protection legislation in Wales and its effect on sustainability in the near future and beyond.

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel

Royce Mahawatte — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

George Eliot and the Gothic Novel tracks George Eliot’s reading of gothic and sensational literature and her responses to them in her own works. Royce Mahawatte focuses on the frightening, startling, and melodramatic elements of Eliot’s fiction, placing Eliot within a culture of mid-Victorian sensationalism and highlighting the connections between her and authors like Mary Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. Mahawatte argues that suspenseful and popular tropes play a significant role in Eliot’s literary ethics and creativity and that our understanding of the author’s writing needs to be broadened to include her extensive and complex engagement with the gothic tradition.

Monastic Wales

Janet Burton; Karen Stöber — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Monastic Wales brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, working in the areas of history, archaeology, literature, and material culture, to investigate the importance of medieval monasteries in the shaping of Welsh culture, politics, society, and economy. It demonstrates the importance of Welsh monasteries and nunneries, chronicling the many and diverse ways in which religious men and women and their communities contributed to the shaping of the equally diverse regions we now call Wales.

Female Gothic Histories

Diana Wallace — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Female Gothic Histories is an important new study of the ways in which women writers have used the gothic novel to symbolize and counter their exclusion from traditional historical narratives. Beginning with a detailed reading of Sophia Lee’s critically neglected The Recess, one of the earliest historical gothic fictions, Diana Wallace traces the development of this form from works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Daphne du Maurier, and the modern gothics of Victoria Holt, to the phenomenally popular novels of Sarah Waters.

Spanish Civil War

Anindya Raychaudhuri — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

While the intricate relationship between history, memory, and representation is of central concern in contemporary society in general, it is perhaps more alive in Spain than in any other European country. The seventy-fifth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War has reignited interest in this field. The Spanish Civil War: Exhuming a Buried Past features cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research on the political, historical, cultural, and literary legacy of the Spanish Civil War by a mixture of new and leading scholars from Europe, North America, and New Zealand.

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763-1813

John Barrell — Wed, 15 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Born in Ruthin, Denbighshire, Edward Pugh (1763–1813) was a Welsh-speaking artist and writer who worked as a miniaturist in London, exhibiting frequently at the Royal Academy. But Pugh’s passion was the landscape, and he painted remarkable views of North Wales that not only captivate but also reveal the development of the Welsh economy and Welsh national consciousness. Pugh also wrote and illustrated a fascinating, informative, and humorous account of a tour of North Wales around 1800—one of the only travel books written at that time by someone who could actually converse with the inhabitants.

Edward Pugh of Ruthin 1763–1813 is the first book to consider the work of this nearly forgotten Welsh artist and writer in detail, linking the history of art in Wales with the social history of the country. John Barrell shows how Pugh’s pictures and writings portray rural life and social change in Wales during his lifetime, from the effects of the war with France on industry and poverty, to the need to develop and modernize the Welsh economy, to the power of the landowners. Almost all of the pictures and accounts we have today of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century North Wales were made by English artists and writers, and none of these, as Barrell demonstrates, can tell us about life in North Wales with the same depth and authenticity as does Pugh.

English-Language Poetry from Wales, 1789-1806

Elizabeth Edwards — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This anthology presents a selection of poetry from Wales written in English in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. Arranged chronologically, it brings together a wide selection of little-known texts, some of which are published here for the first time. A comprehensive introduction sets the poems in their cultural and historical contexts, while detailed endnotes give concise biographies of the writers—where known—and explain specific references within the texts.

Fantastic and European Gothic

Matthew Gibson — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This fascinating study examines the rise of fantastic and frénétique literature in Europe during the nineteenth century, introducing readers to lesser-known writers like Paul Féval and Charles Nodier, whose vampires, ghouls, and doppelgängers were every bit as convincing as those of the more famous Bram Stoker and Ann Radcliffe, but whose political motivations were far more serious. Matthew Gibson demonstrates how these writers used the conventions of the Gothic to attack both the French Revolution and the rise of materialism and positivism during the Enlightenment. At the same time, Gibson challenges current understandings of the fantastic and the literature of terror as promulgated by critics like Tzvetan Todorov, David Punter, and Fred Botting.

Proust and the Visual

Nathalie Aubert — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This edited collection considers the role of the visual in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and how it contributes to the novel’s sense of modernity. The first few essays examine the philosophical implications of Proust’s quest for truth, taking up analyses of the thing, the body, and the relation between the seer and the visible. The essays in the second section concentrate on the way meaning emerges from the description of experience, as well as the cultural environment in which it is inscribed through the workings and reworkings of certain images and textures. The final essays explore how Proust’s unique approach to the visual has become in recent years the inspiration for other visual practices: film, sculpture, painting, and dance.

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in Wales

Jane Williams — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This book explains the background and effects of the law adopted by the National Assembly of Wales as a result of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It presents studies on several key policy areas where issues of children’s human rights are prominent, including child poverty, special educational needs and health provision, treatment of asylum seekers, and traveler communities. It also examines the key issues of accountability and civic participation, including the questions of involvement of children and young people.

Women's Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Edmundson Makala — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Throughout nineteenth-century Britain, female writers excelled within the genre of supernatural literature. Much of their short fiction and poetry uses ghosts as figures to symbolize the problems of gender, class, economics, and imperialism, thus making their supernatural literature something more than just a good scare. Women’s Ghost Literature in Nineteenth-Century Britain recovers and analyzes for a new audience this “social supernatural” ghost literature, as well as the lives and literary careers of the women who wrote it.

R. S. Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

During his lifetime R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) achieved notoriety as the Ogre of Wales, a Welsh extremist, and a poet of serial obsessions. Published to mark the centenary of his birth, this volume explores those elements that fueled Thomas’s fiercely intense imagination, including Wales, his family, and his vexed relationship with religion, as well as with his best-known character, Iago Prytherch. Here, these familiar obsessions are set in several unusual contexts that bring his poetry into startling new relief: his war poems are considered alongside his early work focusing on the English topographical tradition; comparisons with Borges and Levertov underline the international dimensions of his concerns; the intriguing “secret code” of some of his Welsh-language references is cracked; and his painting-poems, including several hitherto unpublished, are brought to the forefront.

Rediscovering Margiad Evans

Kirsti Bohata; Katie Gramich — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Margiad Evans (1909–58) was an outstanding writer of the Welsh borderlands whose work was widely admired during her lifetime. She wrote novels, short stories, poetry, and autobiographical works of great originality and nuance. Her life was transformed in later years by epilepsy, followed by the diagnosis of a brain tumor that led to her early death. This major volume of essays sets out to rediscover the extraordinary work of Margiad Evans, from her use of folktale and the Gothic to the influence of her epilepsy on her creative work.

Mexican Transition

Roger Bartra — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Until the year 2000, when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party won the presidential election, Mexico was ruled by one of the most enduring autocratic regimes of the twentieth century, the Institutional Revolutionary Party. Here Roger Bartra chronicles the key moments that led to the Mexican transition to democracy and reflects on the different aspects of civic culture, the political process, and electoral struggles that played a role in that journey. Bartra also explores the setbacks that have plagued the nation since Fox’s election, including the war on drug trafficking, and offers some insightful conclusions about Mexico’s political future.

Transforming Childcare and Listening to Families

Wendy Ball — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

This book draws on original research to consider the connections between childcare, family lives, and social policy. The research, conducted in Wales during the period following devolution, looks at the effect of policy on family well-being. Through interviews with mothers and fathers of young children, Wendy Ball analyzes day-to-day childcare arrangements, focusing on such factors as gender, social networks, material circumstances, and neighborhood resources. Ball identifies a significant gap between what matters to parents and what is currently being offered in policy and service provision.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Karl Posso — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Best known as Jorge Luis Borges’s right-hand man, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914–99) was, in his own right, an inventive writer of considerable skill. His works, often dismissed summarily as fantastic fiction, are now ripe for reassessment. This volume looks at Bioy’s extensive oeuvre, which offers many surprising reflections on the twentieth century’s cultural, social, and political transformations, both in Argentina and further afield. Topics covered include Bioy’s meditations on isolation and logic and his enduring fascination with the impact of visual technologies on all artistic representation.

Mindscapes of Montréal

Ceri Morgan — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In Mindscapes of Montréal, Ceri Morgan examines a number of francophone novels written between 1960 and 2005 and set in Montréal. Morgan captures each book’s formal innovations and engagements with the complex cultural and linguistic geographies of Montréal. She then broadens her analysis and fills in the aesthetic, social, and political backdrops against which these novels were written. In doing so, Morgan demonstrates the importance of the imagination in our experience and understanding of the urban.

Welsh Poetry of the French Revolution, 1789-1805

Cathryn A. Charnell-White — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

This anthology presents a selection of poems written by Welsh writers living in Wales and London in response to the French Revolution. Edited and translated from Welsh into English for the first time, these poems artfully capture this period of unprecedented change and upheaval, challenging what it meant to be Welsh, British, and patriotic amid shifting views on religious affiliation. Accompanying the English poems are the Welsh originals as well as explanatory notes and an introductory essay that provide context.

Rimbaud's Impressionist Poetics

Aimée Israel-Pelletier — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In the early 1870s, Arthur Rimbaud, indisputable genius of French poetry, invented a new style that captured the energy and visual complexity of modern life, changing fundamentally the way subsequent poetry would be written. At the same time in Paris and London, impressionist painters were revolutionizing the way art was produced, exhibited, viewed, and discussed. This book places Rimbaud’s radical poetic experiments alongside the equally disruptive experiments of impressionist painters and advances the argument that impressionism’s laissez-faire ideology helps explain Rimbaud’s decision to abandon poetry for commerce.