This volume brings together Virginia Woolf's last two novels, The Years (1937) which traces the lives of members of a dispersed middle-class family between 1880 and 1937, and Between the Acts (1941), an account of a village pageant in the summer preceding the Second World War which successfully interweaves comedy, satire and disturbing observation. Rewriting the traditional family saga and the pageant, these unsettling novels provide extraordinary critiques of Englishness and English identity while pursuing compelling existentialist and psychological themes such as the nature of time, memory, personal relationships and sexual desire. Their tightly constructed narratives enable the reader to experience the fragmented lives of their characters and the difficulties that they have in communicating with each other and even understanding themselves. Read together, these novels illuminate each other in ways that will engage both the student and the general reader.

This second edition reviews Carter's novels in the light of recent critical developments and offers entirely new perspectives on her work. There are now extended single chapters on Carter's most widely-studied novels, including" The Passion of New Eve" and "Nights at the Circus," and discussion of the long essay "The Sadeian Woman."

Governing Military Technologies in the 21st Century is one of the first books to tackle the big five technological threats all in one place: nanotech, robotics, cyberwar, human enhancement, and, non-lethal weapons, weaving a historical, legal, and sociopolitical fabric into a discussion of their development, deployment, and, potential regulation.

This New Casebook provides an overview of the criticism of work by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, and an introduction to the key works and issues in African-American literary scholarship. It is supported by the first annotated bibliography of the different critical approaches which have been taken to Morrison's fiction. The essays provide insights into the structure, themes, language and contexts of her novels which will prove invaluable for both new readers and those already familiar with her work.

This textbook provides an examination of modern literary theory and critical appreciation from the perspective of the creative writer. The book is intended for students of English literature and language, teachers, student teachers and teacher educators.

This pioneering study introduces readers to key themes from animal studies, as a frame within which it examines the representation of animals and animality in the work of a range of authors. In this new approach to animal studies, the concept of a relational universe that has emerged in recent natural and physical science is argued as being central. With fresh readings of Welsh literary and non-literary publications, including the Welsh press and Welsh-language manuals, the book explores relationships among animals and between humans and animals, to approach subjects such as intelligence, sensibility and knowledge from an animal perspective. The possibility of redrawing and reclaiming a history of rural and industrial Wales is suggested according to an animal history and agenda. This innovative contribution to Welsh and animal studies illuminates fascinating and controversial subjects, including animal domestication, captivity, communication, biopsychology, human exceptionalism, zoos and farming.

This book is the first comparative study of fiction by late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. It breaks new ground in its comparative framework and in exploring texts that deserve more serious critical attention than they have received and which deal with subjects that have been previously absent from or marginalized in Welsh and Irish literary fiction in English. It will therefore be useful to students of literature who have some knowledge of literature from these countries but will also be accessible to readers who are exploring the writing of these countries for the first time. The book will also be of interest to students interested in women's studies, gender studies, and cultural studies as well as Welsh, Irish and Celtic studies and was written with this in mind.

This new study offers innovative readings of key contemporary Irish novels, employing a range of historical, psychoanalytic and theoretical approaches. In reading texts by established writers such as Brian Moore and William Trevor against work by younger writers, including Roddy Doyle, Glenn Patterson and Kathleen Ferguson, Peach addresses the diversity of Irish fiction and the complexity of Northern Ireland and Ireland's history and culture. The book considers different modes of writing and themes such as postmodernity, gender, family, fetishism, Catholicism, historical trauma and intercorporeality.

Emyr Humphreys, born in 1919, is one of the most prolific and significant modern Welsh writers. Generally rooted in North Wales, his fiction provides fresh insights into modern Welsh history, nonconformity, and globalization. This pioneering book explores Humphreys's work from a range of contemporary critical perspectives and stresses its relevance to the twenty-first century. Through readings that highlight such subjects as gender identity, familial relationships, war, pacifism, and otherness, Linden peach argues that Humphrey's work is best understood as dramatic, dissident, or dilemma fiction.

This book introduces the contribution of modern Welsh literature to our understanding of peace and pacifism - an important and much overlooked subject in Welsh studies. Taking a literary-historical approach to the subject, it reveals how modern Welsh writing opens up history in ways in which historical discourse alone sometimes fails to do. It argues that the concepts of peace, peacefulness and pacifism have played a broader and more complex role in Welsh life than has been recognised, primarily through an influential Welsh-language pacifist intelligentsia. The author reminds us that Welsh pacifism is distinguished from English pacifism by the Welsh language itself, its links with Welsh nationalism and by the fact that it faced challenges and pressures never encountered by English pacifism. Authors discussed in this study include Tony Curtis, George M. Ll. Davies, Pennar Davies, John Eilian, Emyr Humphreys, Glyn Jones, D. Gwenallt Jones, T. Gwynn Jones, T. E. Nicholas, Iorwerth C. Peate, Angharad Price, Ned Thomas, Lily Tobas and Waldo Williams.

This New Casebook provides an overview of the criticism of work by Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, and an introduction to the key works and issues in African-American literary scholarship. It is supported by the first annotated bibliography of the different critical approaches which have been taken to Morrison's fiction. The essays provide insights into the structure, themes, language and contexts of her novels which will prove invaluable for both new readers and those already familiar with her work.