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This is the fifth volume in a pioneering series of authoritative studies on the social history of the Welsh language. It contains twenty-two chapters, all written by acknowledged experts in the field, dealing with the status of the Welsh language in a wide range of social domains, including agriculture and industry, education, religion, politics, law and culture. Although bureaucrats, Celtophobes and some of the upwardly mobile Welsh-speaking bourgeoisie were reluctant to promote the interests of the native tongue, these clearly exerted enormous potential for Welsh to become, both numerically and socially, a powerful influence in several contested domains. The series 'A Social History of the Welsh Language', the fruits of the second major research project of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies of the University of Wales, will interest and intrigue the general public as well as specialists in the field and help readers to familiarise themselves with the history of a language which, over the centuries, has been an integral part of the everyday life of the Welsh people and their sense of nationhood. ... Read more

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Salvaging Spenser is a major new work of literary revision which places Edmund Spenser's corpus, from The Shepheardes Calender to A View of the Present State of Ireland, within an elaborate cultural and political context. The author refuses to engage in the sterile opposition between apology and attack that has marred studies of Spenser and Ireland, seeking neither to savage nor to save, but rather, in a project of critical recovery, to salvage Spenser from the wreckage of Irish history. ... Read more

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Beginning with Alexis de Tocqueville and Frances Trollope, visitors to America have written some of the most penetrating and, occasionally, scathing commentaries on U.S. politics and culture. Observing America focuses on four of the most insightful British commentators on America between 1890 and 1950. The colorful journalist W. T. Stead championed Anglo-American unity while plunging into reform efforts in Chicago. The versatile writer H. G. Wells fiercely criticized capitalist America but found reason for hope in the administrations of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt. G. K. Chesterton, one of England’s great men of letters, urged Americans to preserve the vestiges of Jeffersonian democracy that he still discerned in the small towns of the heartland. And the influential political theorist and activist Harold Laski assailed the business ethos that he believed dominated the nation, especially after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. 
    
Robert Frankel examines the New World experiences of these commentators and the books they wrote about America. He also probes similar writings by other prominent observers from the British Isles, including Beatrice Webb, Rudyard Kipling, and George Bernard Shaw. The result is a book that offers keen insights into America’s national identity in a time of vast political and cultural change. ... Read more

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Galia Ofek's wide-ranging study elucidates the historical, artistic, literary, and theoretical meanings of the Victorians' preoccupation with hair. Victorian writers and artists, Ofek argues, had a well-developed awareness of fetishism as an overinvestment of value in a specific body part and were fully cognizant of hair's symbolic resonance and its value as an object of commerce. In particular, they were increasingly alert to the symbolic significance of hairstyling. Among the writers and artists Ofek considers are Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant, Charles Darwin, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Eliza Lynn Linton, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Herbert Spencer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Aubrey Beardsley. By examining fiction, poetry, anthropological and scientific works, newspaper reviews and advertisements, correspondence, jewellery, paintings, and cartoons, Ofek shows how changing patterns of power relations between women and patriarchy are rendered anew when viewed through the lens of Victorian hair codes and imagery during the second half of the nineteenth century. ... Read more

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Speech and writing form the basis of much modern critical thinking, but there is little consensus about what they are or whether there is any essential difference between them. In this book, Fielding explores the concepts of nationality and culture in the context of 19th-century Scottish fiction, namely Walter Scott, James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson and Margaret Oliphant.Through this exploration, she concludes that the differences between speech and writing are created by social forces. ... Read more

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This Companion explores the remarkable variety of forms that Shakespeare's life and works have taken over the course of four centuries, ranging from the early modern theatrical marketplace to the age of mass media, and including stage and screen performance, music and the visual arts, the television serial and popular prose fiction. The book asks what happens when Shakespeare is popularized, and when the popular is Shakespeareanized; it queries the factors that determine the definitions of and boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the canonical and the authorized and the subversive, the oppositional, the scandalous and the inane. Leading scholars discuss the ways in which the plays and poems of Shakespeare, as well as Shakespeare himself, have been interpreted and reinvented, adapted and parodied, transposed into other media, and act as a source of inspiration for writers, performers, artists and film-makers worldwide. ... Read more

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An Essential Companion
An essential companion to an important topic. The essays in this collection compel readers to think harder about high versus low cultures. Never black and white. ... Read more

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The second in a three-volume sequence, this text covers the period between 1930-1955, providing an analysis of British literatre within its historical, cultural and artistic context. It identifies the crucial relationships between literature and other art forms and culture. ... Read more

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Provides a new and much needed appraisal of Ireland's engagement with the phenomenon of modernity. The path we have travelled from being a rural-based, religious, traditional, insular country, to a secular, highly prosperous economic hi-tech centre has brought in its wake both problems and advantages. 'Engaging Modernity' evaluates how in the realms of politics, culture and literature, Ireland has undergone a major paradigm shift. This book is composed of a selection of papers from a conference held under the auspices of EFACIS (European Federation of Centres and Associations of Irish Studies) in Aarhus (Denmark) in 2001 and organised by Michael Böss. It brought together academics and commentators from many European countries and the book bears witness to a diversity of opinions on Ireland's recent evolution. ... Read more

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In this major reinterpretation of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement, Linda Dowling argues that such classic works of Victorian art writing such as Ruskin's Stones of Venice of Morris's Lectures on Art or Wilde's Critic as Artist become wholly intelligible only within the larger ideological context of the Whig aesthetic tradition.

The Vulgarization of Art explores the tragic consequences for the Aesthetic Movement when a repressed and irresolvable conflict between Shaftesbury's assumption of "aristocratic soul" and the Victorian ideal of "aesthetic democracy" repeatedly shatters the hopes of such writers as Ruskin, Morris, Pater, and Wilde for social transformation through the aesthetic sense.

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Covering a period from c.1450 to the present, this Companion is designed to serve the needs of readers whose interests lie well beyond the familiar boundaries of Irish culture. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Fair to middling
Purchased this book for an Irish Studies program and found it full of interesting information.However, as the course progressed fewer and fewer pieces of relevant information were included.

A very good book to own for reference, but it would not be considered, by any stretch of my imagination, as encyclopedic and all encompassing.Purchase this book as a good addition to a library, but not the one and only source. ... Read more

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Explores the connection between high literary culture and popular culture and argues for cultural anarchism as a form of creative resistance.
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These essays present a balance of theory and practice, of literary and cultural criticism, of gender, race, aesthetic, colonial and political issues. ... Read more

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This is the first book to examine the various uses of the Arthurian legend in Hollywood film, covering films from the 1920s to the present. The authors use five representational categories: intertextual collage (or "cult" film); melodrama, which focuses on the love triangle; conservative propaganda, pervasive during the Cold War; the Hollywood epic; and the postmodern quest, which commonly employs the grail portion of the legend. Arguing that filmmakers rely on the audience's rudimentary familiarity with the legend, the authors show that only certain features of the legend are activated at any particular time. This fascinating study shows us how the legend has been adapted and how through the popular medium of Hollywood films, the Arthurian legend has survived and flourished. ... Read more