Presents a comparative study of fiction by late twentieth and twenty-first century women writers from Ireland, Northern Ireland and Wales. This work is of interest to students interested in women’s studies, gender studies, and cultural studies as well as Welsh, Irish and Celtic studies.

The underlying premise of this book is that reading is touching. Words leap out of their beds and pierce flesh like a knife. Storytelling breathes within the dynamic of encounters with air, fire, earth and water, permeated by emotion, imagination and touch. These ideas are contextualized within ancient community rituals, social justice gatherings, pedagogical practices, and map-making. The four elements are retrieved from exile as imaginative, corporeal, and generative substances that operate within stories like medicine bundles. Reading becomes a Deleuzian ‘enterprise of health’, a challenging experience that grasps Paulo Freire’s generative themes, and is simultaneously thought-provoking and valuable. The capacious literary space capable of housing this sensual ferment is the novel. More verb than noun, the novel is an elemental bundle that engages with flesh in all its manifestations. This book spotlights Irish novels by John Banville and Mary Morrissy, exploring how they revitalise the elements with sensual, social, and tactile textures.

The short story is moving from relative neglect to a central position in the curriculum; as a teaching tool, it offers students a route into many complex areas, including critical theory, gender studies, postcolonialism and genre. This book offers a practical guide to the short story in the classroom, covering all these fields and more.

This study pairs selected Irish and British women novelists of three periods, relating their voices to the women's movements in their respective nations. In the first wave, nationalist and militant ideologies competed with the suffrage fight in Ireland. Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September illustrates the melancholy of gender performance and confusion of ethnic identity in the dying Anglo-Irish Ascendancy class. In England, suffrage ideologies clashed with socialism and patriotism. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway contains a political unconscious that links its characters across class and gender. In the second wave, heterosexual romantic relationships come under scrutiny. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy reveals ways in which Irish Catholic ideologies abject femaleness; her characters internalize this abjection to the point of self-destruction. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook pits the protagonist's aspirations to write novels against the Communist Party's prohibitions on bourgeois values. In the third wave, Irish writers express the frustrations of their cultural identity. Nuala O'Faolain's My Dream of You takes her protagonist back to Ireland to heal her psychic wounds. In England, Thatcherism had created a materialistic culture that eroded many feminists' socialist values. Fay Weldon's Big Woman satirizes the demise of second-wave idealism, asking where feminism can go from here.

This book maps the most active and vibrant period in the history of British women's writing. Examining changes and continuities in fiction, poetry, drama, and journalism, as well as women's engagement with a range of literary and popular genres, the essays in this volume highlight the range and diversity of women's writing since 1970.

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.

The book takes a literary-historical approach to its subject which opens up new perspectives on the history of peace and pacifism in Wales which historical approaches alone have overlooked. It includes English- and Welsh-language texts and highlights the interdependence of English and Welsh culture in Wales. Quotations from Welsh-language texts are given in Welsh and in English translation to assist readers who are not Welsh speakers. The reader is introduced to the changing nature of pacifism, peace and anti-warism and how these terms have acquired different meanings over time. The historical narrative is designed to make this scholarship more accessible to the reader who is not a specialist in peace studies. The arguments of the book are illustrated and developed in accessible but original readings of key Welsh writers on peace and pacifism.

It is a study of the relationship between identity and religion in women’s lives in Wales today. It will help the reader have a better and more comprehensive understanding of the religious context in Wales to the present day. It will introduce the reader to theological and religious themes as well as reflections on identity in the work of several key female Welsh writers – Menna Elfyn, Jasmine Donahaye, Jam Morris, Charlotte Williams and Mererid Hopwood. It will help the reader to engage with issues of Welsh identity and religion and gain insight into challenges facing the churches today and engage with the lived experience of women in Wales.

The relationship between nation and queer sexuality has long been a fraught one, for the sustaining myths of the former are often at odds with the needs of the latter. This collection of essays introduces readers to important historical and cultural figures and moments in queer life, and it addresses some of the urgent questions of queer belonging that face Wales today.

This book analyses how contemporary Welsh poetry, in both Welsh and English, constructs Wales as both human and physical space, within the context of 'ecocriticism', a literary critical practice that emerges out of environmentalist concern. It is one of the most recent interdisciplinary fields to have emerged in literary and cultural studies.