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Two doctors and a folklorist meet in northern Brittany in 1898,
determined to prove that leprosy still exists. But their ardour for
collecting evidence draws them into a dark, watchful landscape
where superstition is rife. Many of the stories in All the Souls
hover round themes of 'collecting' and recovering the past. From
poignant and dangerous obsessions with the iconic (a Romano-British
figurine; a carved wooden Christ-child; a bronze angel) to direct,
often puzzled conversations with ghosts, the characters in this
book all strive to make contact with the impossible. A girl becomes
obsessed with a figure she only sees through a Camera Obscura; an
angry man strikes up a friendship with a sixth-century saint; a
revenant mother by a mountain lake tries to explain herself to a
grieving friend.
In July 1789 George Cadogan Morgan, born in Bridgend, Wales, and
the nephew of the celebrated radical dissenter Richard Price
(1723-91), found himself caught up in the opening events of the
French Revolution and its consequences. In 1808, his family left
Britain for America where his son, Richard Price Morgan, travelled
extensively, made a descent of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers by
raft and helped build some of the early American railroads. The
adventures of both men are related here via letters George sent
home to his family from France and through the autobiography
written by his son in America.
A special number devoted to Celtic material. This special number of
the well-established series Arthurian Literature is devoted to
Celtic material. Contributions, from leading experts in Celtic
Studies, cover Welsh, Irish and Breton material, from medieval
texts to oral traditions surviving into modern times. The volume
reflects current trends and new approaches in this field whilst
also making available in English material hitherto inaccessible to
those with no reading knowledge of the Celticlanguages. CERIDWEN
LLOYD-MORGAN has published widely in the field of Arthurian
studies. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow in the School of
Welsh, Cardiff University.
During Iolo Morganwg's lifetime Britain was obsessed with literary
forgery. This book reveals the unexpected connections and hidden
influences behind Britain's most successful (and hence, perhaps,
least visible) Romantic forger. Quoting extensively from
unpublished manuscripts, it explores Iolo's own strongly-held ideas
about the Truth-historical, literary and religious - and shows how
he responded to the work and the criticism of both James Macpherson
and Thomas Chatterton. It also shows how, after death, his ideas
affected the Breton writer Hersart de La Villemarque, whose
ordination as a Iolo-style bard in 1838 helped to bring about a
Celtic cultural revival in Brittany. The subject sits neatly at the
intersection of two currently popular critical domains: British
Romantic literary forgery, and Celticism.
The late eighteenth century was one of the most exciting and
unsettling periods in European history, with the shock-waves of the
French Revolution rippling around the world. As this collection of
essays by leading scholars shows, Wales was no exception. From
political pamphlets to a Denbighshire folk-play, from bardic poetry
to the remodelling of the Welsh landscape itself, responses to the
revolutionary ferment of ideas took many forms. We see how Welsh
poets and preachers negotiated complex London - Wales networks of
patronage and even more complex issues of national and cultural
loyalty; and how the landscape itself is reimagined in fiction,
remodelled a la Rousseau, while it rapidly emptied as impoverished
farming families emigrated to the New World. Drawing on a wealth of
vibrant material in both Welsh and English, much of it unpublished,
this collection marks another important contribution to 'four
nations' criticism, and offers new insights into the tensions and
flashpoints of Romantic-period Wales.
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