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'.

R.S. Thomas (1913-2000) is a major writer of our time, one of the finest religious poets in the English language and one of Wales's greatest poets. His output was prolific: over six decades he published some 25 individual collections of poems, as well as several volumes of prose. A substantial number of his poems, however, have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive - poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions. Uncollected Poems - published to mark the centenary of Thomas's birth - brings together for the first time a rigorous selection of the best of these. The fruit of several years' research by Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, the volume makes available work which spans the whole of Thomas's career - from an early sonnet to his first wife, M.E. Eldridge (included in his first, unpublished, collection Spindrift in the late 1930s) and an early Iago Prytherch poem published in the Dublin Magazine, to poems which are powerful expressions of the metaphysical meditations of his later years. R.S. Thomas's Uncollected Poems takes its place alongside Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix, 2000), Selected Poems (Penguin, 2003) and Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). It gives readers of R.S. Thomas's work access to much new and fascinating material. Uncollected Poems is a companion volume to R.S. Thomas's Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), the sequel to Collected Poems 1945-1990 (Dent, 1993; Phoenix Press, 2000), which only covers his collections up to Experimenting with an Amen (1986). Collected Later Poems 1988-2000 reprints in full the contents of R.S. Thomas's last five collections, The Echoes Return Slow (Macmillan, 1988: unavailable for many years), and Bloodaxe's Counterpoint (1990), Mass for Hard Times (1992), No Truce with the Furies (1995) and the posthumously published Residues (2002). There is no overlap between the two Bloodaxe editions: none of the poems in Residues, uncollected at the time of his death in 2000, is included in Uncollected Poems.

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. -- .

Welsh drama has been a brutal place - intrigues, murder, violence, passion, sex. At the center has been its writers: the people at the sharp end of getting theatre made. In this revealing selection of interviews. Hazel Walford Davies, one of the leading cultural critics of modern Wales, has allowed fifteen very different writers an opportunity to talk about the craft and business of writing. Essential reading for anyone interested in the history of Welsh theatre.

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.

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.

Praised for his verbal inventiveness, image-making power and almost pagan metaphysics, Dylan Thomas's poems are visions of creation and mortality. This is a collection of his work.

This critical study covers the whole range of Dylan Thomas's writing, both poetry and prose, in an accessible appraisal of the work and achievement of a major and dynamic poet. It interrelates the man and his national-cultural background by defining in detail the Welshness of his poetic temperament and critical attitudes, as both man and poet. At the same time, it illustrates Thomas's wide knowledge of and impact on the long and varied tradition of poetry in English. In that connection, it delineates and delimits Thomas's relationship to surrealism, compares and contrasts his work with that of other poets of the 1930s and 1940s, and shows how its power survives his early death in 1953, in the decade of the 'Movement' poets and beyond. A major aspect of this book is the close textual analysis of the works quoted; it explores anew the recognition due to the man who wrote the work, and helps us to separate the intrinsic achievement of the work from the foisted perceptions of the 'legend'.

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.