Download or read book Merthyr the Crucible of Modern Wales written by Joe England and published by Parthian. This book was released on 2020-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of the nineteenth century Merthyr Tydfil was the largest urban settlement Wales had ever seen. Merthyr, The Crucible of Modern Wales, looks at Merthyr's rise to prominence and how it foretold the economic and social transformation of Welsh history. It was Merthyr, from the armed rising of 1831 to the electoral radicalism of 1868 and 1900, which led the way towards democracy and civic betterment in the teeth of material degradation and high-handed repression. This volume brings the whole epic history of Merthyr, from 1760 to 1912, into the focus of a fresh and utterly convincing perspective. For Modern Wales, see Merthyr, in a book which is a triumph of readability and intellectual passion.

Download or read book Letters from Wales written by Sam Adams and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2023-04-07 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Letters from Wales stands alone as an invaluable guide to Welsh writing.' – Sam Young, Wales Arts Review 'In these columns, as impressive for their depth as they are for their intellectual breadth, Adams analyses the work of acclaimed Welsh writers ... with scholarly panache' – Joshua Rees, Buzz Magazine 'illuminating and entertaining' – Jon Gower, Nation.Cymru Since 1996, Sam Adams's 'Letter from Wales' column has been appearing in PN Review, one of the most highly-regarded UK poetry magazines, offering insight and appreciation of Welsh writing, culture and history. This landmark volume collects these letters – a quarter century of work – and offers one of the most unique, independent and passionate critical voices on the writing and cultural output of Wales during this period. Here you will find erudite appreciations of the work of a wide range of recent and contemporary Welsh writers from Gillian Clarke to Roland Mathias, RS Thomas to Rhian Edwards. Alongside this, Adams offers us lyric essays to Welsh history, and clear-eyed examinations of the institutions of Welsh culture. Collected for the first time in this volume, the 'letters' are among the most significant and sustained attempts during this period to present Welsh writing to an audience throughout the UK and beyond.

Download or read book For Britain See Wales written by Joe England and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Devolved governments have given Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland confidence and control over policy areas for over two decades. But their powers came into focus during Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to questions about the economy and control of funds across the UK. Now Joe England explores the possible constitutional meltdown of a divided UK and its consequences, reflecting on Wales's position as the poorest nation of all. As a constitutional crisis looms, this book contemplates a reimagined Wales and what that would mean for its people. This is the story of how Wales reached an economic and constitutional crossroads and the choices that must now be made.

Download or read book The Welsh Way written by Dan Evans and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues for a new Welsh Way, one that is truly radical and transformational. A call for a political engagement that will create real opportunity for change. Neoliberalism has firmly taken hold in Wales. The 'clear red water' is darkening. The wounds of poverty, inequality, and disengagement, far from being healed, have worsened. Child poverty has reached epidemic levels: the worst in the UK. Educational attainment remains stubbornly low, particularly in deprived communities. Prison population rates are among the highest in Europe. Unemployment remains stubbornly high. House prices are rising, with the private rented sector lining the pockets of an ever-increasing number of private landlords. Minority groups are consistently marginalised. All this is not to mention the devastatingly disproportionate impact of the coronavirus pandemic on working class communities. The Welsh Way interrogates neoliberalism's grasp on Welsh life. It challenges the lazy claims about the 'successes' of devolution, fabricated by Welsh politicians and regurgitated within a tepid, attenuated public sphere. These wide-ranging essays examine the manifold ways in which neoliberalism now permeates all areas of Welsh culture, politics and society. They also look to a wider world, to the global trends and tendencies that have given shape to Welsh life today. Together, they encourage us to imagine, and demand, another Welsh future.

Download or read book Charles written by Huw Thomas and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2023-05-08 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'It's a book which takes its time and really delves into the pivotal moments in Charles' connection with Wales... We are offered a glimpse at a man who has, over the decades, forged both a more formal support to Wales and a more personal warmth for it.' – Emma Schofield, Wales Arts Review 'This is a highly readable and lively book, full of anecdote and character... Thomas needs to be praised for producing a well-written and pacy book on a controversial subject which is neither hatchet job nor fawning tribute.' – Myfanwy Alexander, Nation.Cymru Before Charles became King, he was Prince of Wales. It was a role he took more seriously than any predecessor of the modern British monarchy. From the moment he was created Prince of Wales in 1958 until his accession to the throne, Charles's approach to the role was to serve Wales and to promote Welsh life. But what impact has he had on the country, and what impression did the Welsh leave on him? This book examines the relationship that the Prince nurtured with a nation that meant much more to him than an honorary title. Dozens of interviews have helped Huw Thomas to unearth the untold stories of Charles's work in Wales, alongside the key role he has taken in developing industry, culture and conservation. For a man who has spent almost a lifetime waiting to be King, Huw Thomas reveals how Wales prepared Charles for the crown. Despite his initial reluctance to come to Wales as a student, his time spent learning the history and language of the Welsh at Aberystwyth in the 1960s fostered a passionate commitment to the nation. Wales has not always returned the compliment, with popular protests and more subtle snubs to his involvement in Welsh affairs. And yet those who have worked with him, and who call him a friend, cite a remarkable ability to make a difference without making a fuss. As a diplomat he is credited with bringing major employers to south Wales, offering jobs to a workforce that had been decimated by the collapse of the coal industry. As a cultural ambassador he revived royal patronage for the arts in Wales and sponsored the finest performers to emerge from the land of song. And as a champion of the natural environment, he has backed the farmers and conservationists who are nurturing the Welsh countryside, not least by employing traditional crafts to create the first royal home in Wales for 400 years.

Download or read book Queer Square Mile written by Kirsti Bohata and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2021-10-21 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: QUEER SQUARE MILE: Queer Short Stories from Wales Edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan and Huw Osborne This ground-breaking volume makes visible a long and diverse tradition of queer writing from Wales. Spanning genres from ghost stories and science fiction to industrial literature and surrealist modernism, these are stories of love, loss and transformation. In these stories gender refuses to be fixed: a dashing travelling companion is not quite who he seems in the intimate darkness of a mail coach, a girl on the cusp of adulthood gamely takes her father's place as head of the house, and an actor and patron are caught up in dangerous game-playing. In the more fantastical tales there are talking rats, flirtations with fascism, and escape from a post-virus 'utopia'. These are stories of sexual awakening, coming out and redefining one's place in the world. Release and a certain heady license may be found in the distant cities of Europe or north Africa, but the stories are for the most part located in familiar Welsh settings – a schoolroom, a provincial town, a mining village, a tourist resort, a sacred island. The intensity of desire, whether overt, playful, or coded, makes this a rich and often surprising collection that reimagines what being queer and Welsh has meant in different times and places. The first anthology of its kind in Wales, which finally sheds light on a largely hidden queer cultural history with the careful selection of over 40 short stories (1837-2018). New translations of Kate Roberts, Mihangel Morgan, Jane Edwards, Pennar Davies and Dylan Huw make available their compelling stories for the first time to a non-Welsh speaking readership. Previously unpublished works by writers such as Margiad Evans and Ken Etheridge appear alongside better known favourites.

Download or read book Only Three Votes written by Gwynoro Jones and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "These were events which prefigured and did much to shape the political battles of the last half century, the devolution half century in Wales. They shaped the non-nationalist, but distinctive Welsh social democratic preferences of the last sixty years. For anyone interested in the formative moments of today's Wales, this is both essential and highly entertaining reading." – Mark Drakeford, First Minister of Wales 2018-2024 It was a period of Welsh politics that has become etched in the collective memory. The rise of a Welsh independence movement and the first Plaid Cymru Member of Parliament. The Labour Party searching for a way forward in a political climate that was riven with dissension and eventual rancour. It was a fight for social democracy against the centralised power of the British state. The first battlefield was Carmarthen and the protagonists were Gwynfor Evans, the leader of Plaid Cymru and the young Labour hopeful Gwynoro Jones. Their rivalry lasted throughout the Seventies. They fought three elections and on one occasion the result was decided by just three votes. This book tells the story of a political rivalry which was also very personal. It was a local confrontation that drew on national battlelines. It was about Carmarthen and Wales. Both men had their vision of the Wales they wanted to fight for. These pages unfold the story from Gwynoro Jones' perspective for the first time, in an attempt to redress the imbalance of Gwynfor Evans' story dominating the narrative for so long. Drawing on an extensive archive, collected at the time, Gwynoro shows how the two fought their politics in the newspapers of the day and through speeches on constituency public platforms, where they argue about the Welsh language and devolution, Europe and agriculture. But they only ever actually met once. Gwynoro also reflects on how he views those turbulent years today. Through their wranglings, a picture is also painted of Welsh politics in the decade that led up to the referendum on devolution in 1979, as Plaid and Labour searched for a way forward. And ultimately, a generation later, to the creation of a parliament for Wales.

Download or read book The Foundations of Modern Wales written by Geraint H. Jenkins and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1642 and 1780, powerful social forces transformed Wales from an impoverished, downtrodden, and sleepy nation to one on the threshold of unprecedented social, economic, and political change. Drawing on an extensive range of original and published material, Jenkins reveals how demographic growth, agrarian advancements, the development of heavy industries and trade, and improved communications created the foundation for modern Wales. Among the colorful and influencial personalities who appear in this book are Vavasor Powell, Sir Watkin Williams Wynn, Edward Lhuyd, and Sir Humphrey Mackworth.

Download or read book Modern Wales written by Kenneth O. Morgan and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work presents a series of studies that examine the impact of democracy and the growth of the idea of nationhood in the making of modern Wales. The author explains key aspects of the making of modern Wales in the 19th and 20th centuries. He discusses topics that include political issues from the age of Lloyd George to that of Nye Bevan, a variety of localities, both rural and industrial, and the major political personalities of the period. The book also covers the dominance of the Liberal Party to the World War I, the ascendancy of Labour from the 1920s to the 1990s, and the revived form of nationalism in recent times.

Download or read book Curious Travellers written by Mary-Ann Constantine and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-02 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curious Travellers: Writing the Welsh Tour, 1760-1820 provides the first extensive literary study of British tours of Wales in the Romantic period (c.1760-1820). It examines writers' responses to Welsh landscapes and communities at a time of drastic economic, environmental, and political change. Opening with an overview of Welsh tours up to the early 1700s, Mary-Ann Constantine shows how the intensely intertextual nature of the genre imbued particular sites and locations with meaning. She next draws upon a range of manuscript and published sources to trace a circular tour of the country, unpicking moments of cultural entanglement and revealing how travel-writing shaped understanding of Wales and Welshness within the wider British polity. Wales became a popular destination for visitors following the publication of Thomas Pennant's Tours in Wales in the late 1770s. Hundreds of travel-accounts from the period are extant, yet few (particularly those by women) have been studied in depth. Wales proves, in these narratives, as much a place of disturbance as a picturesque haven--a potent mixture of medieval past and industrial present, exposed down its west coast to the threat of invasion during the Napoleonic Wars. From castles to copper-mines, Constantine explores the full potential of tour writing as an idiosyncratic genre at the interface of literature and history, arguing for its vital importance to broader cultural and environmental studies.

Download or read book Raymond Williams From Wales to the World written by Stephen Woodhams and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2021-09-01 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raymond Williams came from Wales, and was brought up in a working-class family. These facts of place and class are the start of a thread which runs throughout his life and work. In Raymond Williams: From Wales to the World his writing, whether theoretical, historical, critical or as fiction has been treated as a single whole, recognising that his ideas were interwoven as a literary and intellectual engagement with Wales and the world over several decades. This collection of essays, edited by Stephen Woodhams, serves to further engage and extend his ideas of class and society.

Download or read book New Territories in Modernism written by Laura Wainwright and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2018-03-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until very recently, Welsh literary Modernism has been critically neglected, both within and outside Wales. This is the first book devoted solely to the study of Welsh literary Modernism, revealing and examining eight key Anglophone Welsh writers. Laura Wainwright demonstrates how their linguistic experimentation constituted an engagement with the unprecedented linguistic, social and cultural changes that were the making of modern Wales, and formed the crucible for the emergence of a distinct Welsh Modernism. This study of Welsh Modernism challenges conventional literary histories and, in more than one sense, takes Modernism and Modernist studies into new territories.

Download or read book Writing Welsh History written by Huw Pryce and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-05-05 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to explore how the history of Wales and the Welsh has been written over the past fifteen hundred years, 'Writing Welsh History' analyses and contextualizes historical writing, from Gildas in the sixth century to recent global approaches, to open new perspectives both on the history of Wales and on understandings of Wales and the Welsh.

Download or read book New Territories in Modernism written by Laura Wainwright and published by Writing Wales in English. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Until very recently, Welsh literary modernism has been critically neglected, both within and outside Wales. This is the first book solely devoted to the study of Welsh literary modernism, revealing and examining the modernism of eight key Anglophone Welsh writers. Throughout the book, the author demonstrates how the linguistic experimentation of Anglophone Welsh writers both reflects and constitutes their engagement with the modernistic conditions generated by unprecedented linguistic, social and cultural change in modern Wales. The author concludes that Anglophone Welsh writing in the period 1930-49 saw the emergence of a distinct Welsh modernism that now challenges conventional literary histories and, in more than one sense, takes modernism and modernist studies into new territories.

Download or read book New Perspectives on Welsh Industrial History written by Louise Miskell and published by University of Wales Press. This book was released on 2019-12-15 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume tells a story of Welsh industrial history different from the one traditionally dominated by the coal and iron communities of Victorian and Edwardian Wales. Extending the chronological scope from the early eighteenth- to the late twentieth-century, and encompassing a wider range of industries, the contributors combine studies of the internal organisation of workplace and production with outward-facing perspectives of Welsh industry in the context of the global economy. The volume offers important new insights into the companies, the employers, the markets and the money behind some of the key sectors of the Welsh economy – from coal to copper, and from steel to manufacturing – and challenges us to reconsider what we think of as constituting ‘industry’ in Wales.

Download or read book Resist written by Julia Bell and published by Comma Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time that feels unprecedented in British politics – with unlawful prorogations of parliament, casual race-baiting by senior politicians, and a climate crisis that continues to be ignored – it’s easy to think these are uncharted waters for us, as a democracy. But Britain has seen political crises and far-right extremism before, just as it has witnessed regressive, heavy-handed governments. Much worse has been done, or allowed to be done, in the name of the people and eventually, those same people have called it out, stood up, resisted. In this new collection of fictions and essays, spanning two millennia of British protest, authors, historians and activists re-imagine twenty acts of defiance: campaigns to change unjust laws, protests against unlawful acts, uprisings successful and unsuccessful – from Boudica to Blair Peach, from the Battle of Cable Street to the tragedy of Grenfell Tower. Britain might not be famous for its revolutionary spirit, but its people know when to draw the line, and say very clearly, ‘¡No pasarán!’ This project has been supported by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust and the Lipman-Miliband Trust, as well as Arts Council England. Part of Comma's 'History-into-Fiction' series.

Download or read book Smooth Operator written by Geoff Andrews and published by Parthian Books. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a humble background in Barry, where his father was a butcher and local politician in the formative years of the new town, Cyril Lakin studied at Oxford, survived the First World War, and went on to become a Fleet Street editor, radio presenter and war-time member of parliament. As literary editor of both the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times, Lakin was at the centre of a vibrant and radical generation of writers, poets and critics, many of whom he recruited as reviewers. He gained a parliamentary seat and served in the National Government during World War II. The different worlds he inhabited, from Wales to Westminster, and across class, profession and party, were facilitated by his relaxed disposition, convivial company, and ability to cultivate influential contacts. An effective talent-spotter and catalyst for new projects, he preferred pragmatism over ideology and non-partisanship in politics: a moderate Conservative for modern times.