3,543 research outputs found
I Remember piece in which author William Welsh recounts the wooden rowboat his
No full textI Remember piece in which author William Welsh recounts the wooden rowboat his father built in 1957 for use at the family cottage in Boothbay Harbor
'Blerwytirhwng?' The place of Welsh pop music
No full textIn the 1960s, Welsh-language popular music emerged as a vehicle for mobilizing a geographically dispersed community into political action. As the decades progressed, Welsh popular music developed beyond its acoustic folk roots, adopting the various styles of contemporary popular music, and ultimately gaining the cultural self-confidence to compete in the Anglo-American mainstream market. The resulting tensions, between Welsh and English, amateur and professional, rural and urban, the local and the international, necessitate the understanding of Welsh pop as part of a much larger cultural process.Not merely a 'Celtic' issue, the cultural struggles faced by Welsh speakers in a predominantly Anglophone environment are similar to those faced by innumerable other minority communities enduring political, social or linguistic domination. The aim of 'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop is to explore the popular music which accompanied those struggles, to connect Wales to the larger Anglo-American popular culture, and to consider the shift in power from the dominant to the minority, the centre to the periphery.By surveying the development of Welsh-language popular music from 1945-2000, The Place of Welsh Pop examines those moments of crisis in Welsh cultural life which signalled a burgeoning sense of national identity, which challenged paradigms of linguistic belonging, and out of which emerged new expressions of Welshness.<br/
Audiences' willingness to participate in Welsh-language media
No full textPhDContemporary media audiences expect to be able to interact with content, but in a minority language context, audience participation presents challenges related to audiences’ linguistic confidence. This thesis focuses on Wales, where media producers have suggested that audiences are often reluctant to interact with broadcast and online content in Welsh. To begin to understand this unwillingness, and how it might be overcome, the concept of willingness to participate (WTP) is coined as an extension of willingness to communicate (McCroskey & Baer 1985).
First, interviews with producers are analysed qualitatively to identify potential influences on audiences’ WTP. The analysis aims to assess the relative importance of various factors: audiences’ feelings of apprehension, self-perceived competence, language background and Welsh language ability, as well as the modality of participation (oral/written) and the level of demand placed on the audience.
Second, a questionnaire is designed and administered to 358 Welsh speakers, to examine audiences’ perceptions of different opportunities to participate in media content. A path model of WTP is proposed and tested using quantitative data from the survey. The results support the hypothesis that audiences’ apprehension and self-perceived competence predict WTP and that audience response varies according to the media context. While audiences’ Welsh language skills are important in explaining their WTP, other aspects of language background, such as Welsh language acquisition context, are found to be less important.
Third, the survey sample is grouped according to common patterns of WTP, to test whether the above effects are consistent across the population or whether different ‘types’ of audience exist. Using a combination of cluster analysis and thematic analysis of audience comments, four types of audience are proposed and described in detail. Finally, implications for sociolinguistic theory, language maintenance and media production practice are considered and recommendations made.Arts and Humanities Research Counci
Nation building : implementing devolution in the United Kingdom— the Welsh experience
No full textPaper presented to the IBIS conference, Renovation or revolution? new territorial politics in Ireland and the United Kingdom, University College Dublin, 3 April 2002.The Welsh experience of devolution can best be summarised by contrasting it with the Scottish. Where Scotland had an established array of civic institutions, the National Assembly of Wales found itself in the position of having to construct an institutional reality. The Assembly faced a number of constraints: its powers were limited to those previously held by the Secretary of State for Wales, and it was established as a corporate body. However, it soon became clear that the view of the Assembly as a continuation from previous administrations was unsustainable. This paper discusses the role of a number of key characters and agencies in redefining the nature of the National Assembly. In addition to the development of a strong central authority the author tracks the related emergence of a new civic culture in Wales. The paper concludes by examining the broader impact of the Welsh experience of devolution on territorial politics within the British Isles, and Welsh engagement with a network of European regions.Not applicableti,co,ab.kpw8/7/1
The Welsh Revival (1904-1905): Recovering the Role of Welsh Women
No full textThe Welsh Revival of 1904-05 marked a period of social and religious change throughout Wales. For eighteen months, chapels were filled and public houses emptied as the country was engulfed in an emotional, religious frenzy, which many believed to be the work of God. Previous research has focused on the role of Evan Roberts, the enigmatic revivalist who was portrayed as the divinely appointed leader of the movement. My original contribution to knowledge is an analysis of the role of women during the Revival, an aspect of the Revival’s history which has remained unexamined. In particular, this work analyses the contribution of Jessie Penn-Lewis, Allen Raine and the revivalist women who worked both alongside, and independently of, Roberts. Although Penn-Lewis has been included in most Revival studies, she has been wrongly portrayed as a divisive woman who sabotaged the movement by deliberately ending Roberts’s ministry, acting as a spiritual Jezebel. Although a popular author at the turn of the twentieth century, Allen Raine’s Revival critique, told through her novel Queen of the Rushes, has yet to be included within an examination of the Revival. Although Roberts was a key figure in the development and success of the movement, the 1904-05 Revival was the first of its kind to allow women to lead meetings and address congregations. This work examines the role of these women, questioning why so little is known of their wider identities or what happened to them once the Revival ended, following Roberts’s departure from Wales in August 1906. The final chapter considers the afterlife of the Revival, questioning the way in which the movement enabled women to move beyond the role of wife and mother, assessing its role in the emancipation of Welsh women
Between languages the uncooperative text in early Welsh and Old English nature poetry
No full textEarly Welsh and Old English poetry are rarely spoken of together, but when they are, they have been described as like or different from one another. Sarah Higley breaks this cycle of mutual marginalization by examining what it means to read otherness or sameness into a text, concluding that too much of our reading is "anglo-centric" in its expectations and dictated by invisible ideological agendas. Examinations of the Llywarch Hen Corpus, for instance, have sought comparisons among the Old English elegies, but mainly for the purpose of demonstrating how the Welsh are of a color with them: derived from the same penitential genre merely less explicit in their penitential thrust. Scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge the secular nature of these Welsh laments, which are discomfitingly silent about divine solace and which, like the Old English poems, do not cooperate with our efforts to categorize themThe author reexamines notions of genre, category, and poetic "explicitness" and how they snare us. Higley sees the English and Welsh traditions as foils to one another rather than as template and variation, and she starts with the connection of natural image and emotion, employed differently in these two contiguous but separate traditions. She shows how the English poems, long thought to be disjointed and cryptic, are invested in explanation and disclosure to a degree that the Welsh are not. The Welsh "omissions" might be better understood as dynamic juxtapositions wherein other poetic aspects (metrics, imagery, context) serve to link ideas, perhaps even to disrupt them. She sees difficulty, ambiguity, and dialogism as loci of power - neither accidents of our reading distance nor defects in other classical standards of wholenessReading the English and the Welsh together with a respect for the mutual differences helps us to get beyond some of the cliche's about what is English and "familiar" and what is Celtic and "other." Her argument revolves around the plight of the lone human as he or she is depicted in these texts in a precarious state of connection with the rest of the world: caught between society and wilderness, inside and outside, sacred and secular, meaning and nonmeaning. This focus on connection informs the title as well: "between languages" expresses our position as readers reading two different cultures together, reading ancient literature mediated through modern poetic theory, and the position of medieval scholarship in its struggle between traditional and postmodern approache
Building a Welsh jurisdiction through administrative justice
No full textIn light of the current debate around establishing a separate or distinct legal jurisdiction for Wales, the aim of this chapter is to highlight that administrative justice is an area where differences in the administration of justice are already occurring in Wales as compared to England and other parts of the UK. In particular the chapter will focus on devolved tribunals in Wales and comparable tribunal reforms in other devolved parts of the UK. I consider the on-going development of the devolved Welsh tribunals and the place of these institutions in debates surrounding a future Welsh legal jurisdiction
Quality of Welsh Legislation
No full textThis LLM dissertation suggests that the process of devolution has affected the quality of legislation in Wales. The author argues that the quality of devolved Welsh legislation has been influenced by ineffective legal terminology in the Welsh language available to make the drafting of Welsh consistent with English drafting and on its own with the policy. In addition it is suggested that the quality of Welsh legislation has been affected by problems of inaccessibility due to amendment, cross reference and inter related provisions
Editor's Comments to 'Special Issue of World Literature Written in English', edited by Sarah Lawson Welsh
No full textWelsh characters in Renaissance drama
No full textThe Welsh character in Renaissance drama reflects and/or promulgates a stereotype, reflects English discomfort with their Welsh neighbors and the ambivalence that the English felt for the Welsh, and shows the changing status of Wales and the Welsh in England during the late years of Elizabeth Tudor's reign (1557-1603) and the reigns of James I (1603-1625) and Charies I. The Acts of Union,' integrafing Wales into England, initiated a transition of the status of the Welsh in Renaissance England from foreigners to legally recognized English subjects. The Acts created a new situation, calling for new reacfions: the ambiguity of the new Welsh position in English society created a more complicated set of possible reactions than had been necessary before the Acts of Union. The Acts of Union can be compared to the Renaissance marital union: Wales is cast as the wife, who is legally bound to her husband, England, but who does not have equal voice or rights and who must always recognize the superordination of her husband. This analogy fits the evidence of the English attitudes as shown in the dramas
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