Inspired by the lyrical, mythic mode of Italian sports journalism from the 1930s to the 1950s, Viva Bartali! is a biography-in-verse of the iconic Italian cyclist Gino Bartali (1914-2000), two-time winner of the Tour de France (1938, 1948), known both as 'Gino the Pious' because of his fervent Catholic faith, and as Ginettaccio ('Gino the Terrible'), owing to the short shrift he so often gave the Press. Conjuring Bartali at crux moments in his personal and professional career, through joy and tragedy, defeat and victory, the collection places us alongside the young rider proving his mettle and adding to his palmares in the edgy atmosphere of Mussolini's Fascist Italy, whose political ideology he loathed. From amateur races to the professional one-day classics and on to Tour de France glory, Bartali is seen alongside his fellow riders as both vulnerable body and elite athlete; both cycling's hard man and fond and bereaved father; both kneeling believer and climbing god. The collection gives us an insight into the complex relationship that underpinned his great rivalry with the campionissimo ('champion of champions') Fausto Coppi - the 'man of glass' against Bartali's 'man of iron'. It was a rivalry that a divided a nation and defined a sport. We are with Bartali at the 1948 Tour de France when he takes a phone call from the Italian prime minister, who asks him to do his part in diffusing a political crisis that could have tipped over into violence. And we witness his remarkable secret missions in the saddle as a courier throughout Tuscany during World War 2, carrying forged identity documents that helped save the lives of hundreds of Italian Jews. It was a deed he never spoke about - one for which he was named 'Righteous Among the Nations' by Yad Vashem in 2013.

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism's revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism's inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism's "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism's hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

For many years now the professional "creative writer" within universities and other institutions has encompassed a range of roles, embracing a plurality of scholarly and creative identities. The often complex relation between those identities forms the broad focus of this book, which also examines various, and variously fraught, dialogues between creative writers, "hybrid" writers and academic colleagues from other subjects within single institutions, and with the public and the media. At the heart of the book is the principle of "creative writing" as a fully-fledged discipline, an important subject for debate at a time when the future of the humanities is in crisis; the contributors, all writers and teachers themselves, provide first-hand views on crucial questions: What are the most fruitful intersections between creative writing and scholarship? What methodological overlaps exist between creative writing and literary studies, and what can each side of the "divide" learn from its counterpart? Equally, from a pedagogical perspective, what kind of writing should be taught to students to ensure that the discipline remains relevant? And is the writing workshop still the best way of teaching creative writing? The essays here tackle these points from a range of perspectives, including close readings, historical contextualisation and theoretical exploration. Professor Richard Marggraf Turley teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing, Aberystwyth University.BR Contributors: Richard Marggraf Turley, Damian Walford Davies, Philip Gross, Peter Barry, Kevin Mills, Tiffany Atkinson, Robert Sheppard, Deryn Rees-Jones, Zoe Skoulding, Jasmine Donahaye

The "(re)turn to history" in Romantic Studies in the 1980s marked the beginning of a critical orthodoxy that continues to condition, if not define, our sense of the Romantic period twenty-five years on. Romantic New Historicism's revisionary engagements have played a central role in the realignment of the field and in the expansion of the Romantic canon. In this major new collection of eleven essays, critics reflect on New Historicism's inheritance, its achievements and its limitations. Integrating a self-reflexive engagement with New Historicism's "history" and detailed attention to a range of Romantic lives and literary texts, the collection offers a close-up view of Romanticism's hybrid present, and a dynamic vision of its future.

2013 marks the centenary of the Welsh poet RS Thomas' birth. Celebrate the R. S Thomas centenary with this excellent volume that draws together 52 poems (4 previously unpublished) by Thomas to his wife, the distinguished artist Mildred E Eldridge - known as Elsi - from early meditations on their relationship to the elegies following her death. This revelatory collection dramatises the changing dynamics of a complex and vitally creative relationship. Poems on marriage, cohabitation, birthdays, anniversaries, family and bereavement offer a candid portrait of emotional intimacy, desire, the painful process of ageing, and of loss. Elsi is a complex presence here: to the 'to' in the title signifies not only 'addressed to' but also 'about', 'with an eye on', 'to be overheard by', and even in one case 'from'.

Judas Iscariot - one of the Bible's most notorious characters - comes to life in this dramatic and thought-provoking new collection of poems by the Wales-born author Damian Walford Davies published by Seren. Fully aware of how ancient enmities shape modern conflicts the author draws on twenty centuries of representations of Judas to set out a tale that challenges our pre-conceived notions of holiness and betrayal.

Romantic Cartographies is the first collection to explore the reach and significance of cartographic practice in Romantic-period culture. Revealing the diverse ways in which the period sought to map and spatialise itself, the volume also considers the engagement of our own digital cultures with Romanticism's 'map-mindedness'. Original, exploratory essays engage with a wide range of cartographic projects, objects and experiences in Britain, and globally. Subjects range from Wordsworth, Clare and Walter Scott, to Romantic board games and geographical primers, to reveal the pervasiveness of the cartographic imagination in private and public spheres. Bringing together literary analysis, creative practice, geography, cartography, history, politics and contemporary technologies - just as the cartographic enterprise did in the Romantic period itself - Romantic Cartographies enriches our understanding of what it means to 'map' literature and culture.

With the narrative pull of a novel and the vibrancy of a play for voices, Damian Walford Davies's Witch offers a thrilling portrait of a Suffolk village in the throes of the witchcraft hunts of the mid-seventeenth century. The poems in this collection are dark spells, compact and moving: seven sections, each of seven poems, each of seven couplets, are delivered by those most closely involved in the 'making' of a witch. The speakers - from Thomas Love the priest, the villagers who slowly succumb to suspicion and counter-accusation, the 'discoverer of witches' Francis Hurst, and the 'witch' herself - authentically conjure a war-torn society in which religious paranoia amplifies local grievances to fever pitch. Witch is a damning parable that chimes with the terror and anxieties of our own haunted age.

Bondo is Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English. Her title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing solidarity with a nation's wound. Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer. Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. Like her previous Bloodaxe titles, Bondo is a bilingual Welsh-English edition. Again, the facing English translations are by leading Welsh poets, in this case Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. It is her first new book since Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 and the later collection Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date – and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised. -- .

Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl's (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as 'the world's number one storyteller'. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole - his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author's Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic 'Welsh' Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl 'home' in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.

Innovatively extending counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory, Counterfactual Romanticism reveals the ways in which the shapes of Romanticism are conditioned by that which did not come to pass. Exploring various modalities of counterfactual speculation and inquiry across a range of Romantic-period authors, genres and concerns, this collection offers a radical new purchase on literary history, on the relationship between history and fiction, and on our historicist methods to date - and thus on the Romanticisms we (think we) have inherited. Counterfactual Romanticism provides a ground-breaking method of re-reading literary pasts and our own reading presents; in the process, literary production, texts and reading practices are unfossilised and defamiliarised. -- .

Never before published and written in three weeks in the autumn of 1967 after two visits to the Greek detention island of Leros, "The Protagonists "is Brenda Chamberlain's response--both heartbreakingly lyrical and disturbingly visceral--to the right-wing coup d'etat of April 1967. A dangerous, dissident text that draws on the conventions of absurdist theater, the play can be viewed as the dark culmination of Chamberlain's profound, career-long exploration of individuality, belonging, incarceration, imaginative freedom and the social role of the artist. It is also a startlingly candid articulation of her own emotional and psychological "internment" at the time. This edition includes a wealth of additional material, including Chamberlain's own sketches, photographs of the play in performance, an interview with the lead actor, a contemporary review of the play's performance, and an in-depth essay contextualizing Chamberlain's literary techniques and influences.

A study of five figures associated in important ways with Wales, this book looks at the impact on the literature and culture of the late 18th century, heretofore neglected. The five figures studied are Tewdrig, , the Dark-Age hermit-king and saint; Vortigern, the Dark-Age traitor; the Polish general Kosciusko; the radical Welsh "Bard of Liberty, " Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg); and the Jacobin demagogue John Thelwall. Shown are how major figures of the decade such as Wordsworth and Coleridge used these figures as models for their own identities and as a means to define their ideological and emotional positions with regard to the political and cultural debates generated by the French Revolution. Also discussed is the impact of a specifically Welsh discourse on the personal and political consciousness of many writers in this period.

Wales and the Romantic Imagination is the first study devoted exclusively to the appropriation of Wales, its landscape, history, and culture, by writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The collection is diverse yet integrated, and the essays engage meaningfully in dialogue with one another. The volume represents a key intervention in on-going debates about the relation between Romanticism and national identity, antiquarianism, politics, print culture and gender. The essays in this collection fill an important gap in our current understanding of how Romanticism constituted itself out of diverse cultural experiences. The book is likely to prove indispensable for undergraduate and postgraduate students of Romanticism:

The authors in this collection join an animated debate on the persistence of Romanticism. Even as dominant twentieth-century cultural movements have contested Romantic ""myths"" of redemptive Nature, individualism, perfectibility, the transcendence of art, and the heart's affections, the Romantic legacy survives as a point of tension and of inspiration for modern writers. Rejecting the Bloomian notion of anxious revisionism, ""The Monstrous Debt"" argues that various kinds of influences, inheritances, and indebtedness exist between well-known twentieth-century authors and canonical Romantic writers. Among the questions asked by this volume are: How does Blake's graphic mythology submit to ""redemptive translations"" in the work of Dylan Thomas? How might Ted Hughes' strong readings of a ""snaky"" Coleridge illuminate the ""mercurial"" poetic identity of Sylvia Plath? How does Shelley ""sustain"" the work of W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bishop with supplies of ""imaginative oxygen""? In what ways does Keats enable Bob Dylan to embrace influence? How does Keats prove inadequate for Tony Harrison as he confronts contemporary violence? How does ""cockney"" Romanticism succeed in shocking John Betjeman's poetry out of kitsch into something new and strange? ""The Monstrous Debt"" seeks to broaden our sense of what ""influence"" is by defining the complex of relations that contribute to the making of the modern literary text. Scholars and students of the Romantic era will enjoy this informative volume.

Echoes to the Amen is the first collection of critical essays dealing with the work of R. S. Thomas to appear since his death in September 2000. Nine essays consider the achievement and legacy of one of the great poets of the twentieth century, offering a broad and detailed assessment of the full range of Thomas's distinguished career, which can now be seen whole. The volume presents stimulating new readings of the poet's central preoccupations as well as discussions of hitherto neglected themes, and examines the ways in which Thomas negotiated painful cultural, spiritual and emotional tensions. Thomas's ironic anti-pastorals, his poems of filial resentment, his bold charting of the new cosmos, obsessive punning and dialogues with Wallace Stevens and Kierkegaard are among the subjects explored in these essays, which emphasise both the diversity and the underlying unity of Thomas's work. Essential reading for anyone interested in twentieth-century poetry and contemporary Welsh writing in English, Echoes to the Amen allows us to see how the concerns of this icon of modern Wales illuminate a global predicament.