Background: In a part of Wales where over 50% of the population were bilingual, one community physical rehabilitation services had no Welsh speaking therapists. This research attempts to find whether Welsh speakers had the same access to health and social care services and whether their outcomes were similar to non-Welsh speaking patients; and what the service users' opinion were on Welsh language services. Methodology: 1 - Therapy inputs and outcomes of service users who spoke Welsh were compared to service users who did not speak Welsh with a rehabilitation team where no therapists spoke Welsh. 2 - The ratio of Welsh speakers referred to the rehabilitation services and accepted for services were compared with the ratio of Welsh speakers in the general population. 3 - 201 service users were asked for their opinion on services and their language choice, and the possible effect on their ability to effectively receive a rehabilitation service. Results: Significantly fewer Welsh speakers were referred to the rehabilitation service than the anticipated percentage (p < 0.001). Wales' social services do not document individuals' language preference consistently. A significant difference was found in the therapy outcomes measured by outcome measures according to the patients' language if the practitioners could not speak Welsh. Welsh speaking patients had significantly lower results following rehabilitation than non-Welsh speakers (p < 0.05). The vast majority of Welsh speaking patients who were asked believed they would have preferred receiving services in Welsh. Conclusion: Awareness raising training for practitioners and carers, as well as language training, including 'little words' training, would support availability of Welsh language services. Consideration should be given to creating a specialist national agency to maintain a database of Welsh speaking practitioners, from which health boards and local authorities could buy their services when appropriate.

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Volume I. Part I describes the known versions of the Erec/Gereint story, giving whatever information is available about the circumstances of their composition. Particular attention is paid to the manuscript tradition of Erec et Enide by Chrétien de Troyes, to the place occupied in that tradition by the exemplar which was available to Hartmann von Aue, and to the two manuscripts of the French prose adaptation (showing the significance of the text contained in the unpublished Paris MS.). Part II is concerned with the highly problematical relationship between Erec et Enide and the Welsh story of Gereint fab Erbin. It is argued that the author of Gereint must have used a written source that was in a language other than Welsh. However, an important feature of Gereint is the technique of using formulas which, being Welsh, cannot have been taken from the (foreign) narrative source. There is evidence also of borrowing from a passage in the Historia Regum Britanniae, combined with material from Welsh tradition. Since the Welsh author used a technique of composition that will account for the differences between Gereint and Erec there is no advantage in supposing a lost common source. The disadvantages of such a supposition are that Chrétien's source may not have been a written text, and that it requires a belief in a whole series of coincidences to account for the total disappearance of the manuscripts. A final argument is available from the fact that Gereint incorporates information contained in a couplet which seems to be a later interpolation into the Erec text. Volume II contains the material (mainly text) which is to be read in parallel with the main discussion. The major item is an edition of Gereint fab Erbin (with English translation) marked in such a way as to show the different elements of its composition, and with corresponding passages from Erec et Enide set in parallel.

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Aspirations for equality between the English and Welsh languages are widely held in Wales although Welsh is spoken by a minority of the population. Practitioners working through the medium of Welsh face particular challenges which include shortages of resources and limited access to support from Welsh speaking professionals. This thesis describes an intervention over time to strengthen the marginal position of a team of practitioners whose practice takes place through the medium of the Welsh language. Drawing on discursive evidence gathered in a series of team meetings conducted through the medium of Welsh the case study explores the potential of developmental project work to provide a context within which to effect change for practice, professional development and professional identity. The research is grounded in Engeström’s theory of expansive learning and uses methodology based on Vygotsky’s notion of dual stimulation. Forms of discourse analysis is applied to transcripts and textual records of the communicative action of the team. The study charts trajectories of change for the team and team members occurring during the study and beyond. Outcomes have included the establishment of self directed working practices in the development of resources which are valued by local, regional, national and commercial colleagues. The study provides an illustration of how this interventionist approach to support practitioners apply and extend their knowledge and expertise in developmental project work also contributed to professional development through reconstructions of professional identity.

This thesis is a study of the prevalence, context, and experience of illegitimacy in Wales during the long eighteenth century, between approximately 1680 and 1800. It explores levels of illegitimacy across the Welsh counties of Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire, and investigates many of the underlying causes of childbirth outside of wedlock throughout eighteenth-century Wales. It is argued that Welsh illegitimacy was influenced by a combination of courtship-led marriage customs, a decline in traditional forms of social control, and worsening economic circumstances. In addition to exploring broader demographic trends, this study also examines the diverse individual identities, relationships and socioeconomic backgrounds of the mothers and fathers of illegitimate children in Wales, and the lived experience of conception, pregnancy and childbirth for unmarried mothers. The sexual encounters which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child ranged from consensual sex which took place within the context of courtship, to sexual exploitation and rape. It is argued that these broad range of experiences are central to our understanding of illegitimacy. This thesis also examines infant and maternal survival chances, both in terms of overall risk of mortality in the days, weeks, and months after birth, and in terms of the ways in which fatal violence against illegitimate children and their mothers was contextualised in court records. These narratives reveal how the bodies of illegitimate infants and unmarried mothers often represented deviance, and served as the locus of anxieties surrounding unregulated reproduction. Finally, this study also analyses the provision of care for married and unmarried pauper women immediately before, during and after parturition. The skills, reputation, and availability of midwifery services in Wales are also explored. This thesis unites many disparate historical fields, including social and cultural history, historical demography, and the histories of crime, gender, sex, reproduction, and medicine, and analyses evidence from previously unstudied regions of Wales. It demonstrates that illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Wales was a deeply complex phenomenon governed by diverse regionally-specific social, cultural and economic influences.

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This thesis studies contemporary Scottish fiction by four writers Agnes Owens, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Warner, focusing on the problematic position of women characters and feminocentric texts within the dominant class and national(ist) discourses. It argues that the intimate interconstitution between Scottish masculine subjects and class/national politics alienates women from an active political subjectivisation, that the gender matrix of femininity/masculinity underlies the normative selection of which gendered subjects, and accordingly whose symbolic 'voice', can be perceived as 'historical' and 'political'. Scottish working-class men and the texts in which they are the central characters have been considered paradoxically as both a literary reflection of 'political defeatism', but also a form of 'subaltern' counter-politics to British neoliberalism and imperialism. This thesis points out that the common parameters of the debate on the possible (dis)continuation of both class and national(ist) discourses are masculinist, and as such women tend to be perceived as 'non-political' in this (re)politicisation of aesthetics. More fundamentally, these discourses are problematic for women's politicisation because they follow the rule of modern politics which assigns politicality on a fraternal basis, that political struggles are between men of different classes, nationalities and so on. The research interrogates this masculine-centrism in the dominant representational praxis which provides the discursive link between literature, politics, and history which (dis)places feminine subjects into a 'dehistoricised', 'depoliticised' space. It seeks to renegotiate the fraternal terms of this practice and to read feminine subjects and women-centred narratives as capable of conceptually illustrating emancipatory politics.

The present thesis deals with rhythmic differences between Welsh English and the British Standard. It focuses on the varieties spoken in Cardiff and Aberystwyth in particular. The first part of the theoretical chapter summarises the approaches towards rhythm from the physiological, acoustic, perceptual, and phonological perspectives. The second part provides a basic description of the British Standard, Welsh, and Welsh English. It concerns itself with the existing information related to the subject matter especially as regards Welsh varieties of English. The last, third part, serves as an overview of the most common approaches towards the search of the acoustic correlates of rhythm (%V, ∆C, ∆V, PVI, varco, RR, YARD). The following chapters of the thesis present a material based study of the data obtained for the purposes of the thesis. The segmentation was carried out according to the principles proposed by Machač and Skarnitzl 2009. Rhythm was measured for four respondents for each selected location of Wales. The age span was 35-39 years for the group from Cardiff and 29-39 for that from Aberystwyth. The values measured were compared with the research of Volín and Pollák from 2009, which, among other things, provided the results of the rhythmic values for %V and ∆C for the British Standard on the...

This dissertation investigates representations of betrayal in works by Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie, Irvine Welsh, and Alan Hollinghurst. In rethinking "bad" acts of betrayal as embodying an ethical desire not for the good but for "the better," this dissertation challenges the simplistic good/bad binary as mandated by neo-imperialist, late capitalist, and heteronormative society. In doing so, my project intervenes in the current paradigm of ethical literary criticism, whose focus on the canon and the universal Good gained from it runs a risk of underwriting moral majoritarianism and judgmentalism. I argue that some contemporary narratives of betrayal open up onto a new ethic, insofar as they reveal the unethical totalization assumed in ethical literary criticism's pursuit of the normative Good. The first full chapter analyzes how Kureishi's Intimacy portrays an ethical adultery as it breaks away from the tenacious authority of monogamy in portraying adult intimacy in literature, what I call the narrative of "coupledom." Instead, Intimacy imagines a new narrative of "singledom" unconstrained by the marriage/adultery dyad. In the next chapter on Fury, a novel about Manhattan's celebrity culture, I interrogate the current discourse of cosmopolitanism and propose that Rushdie's novel exposes how both cosmopolitanism and nationalism are turned into political commodities by mediafrenzied and celebrity-obsessed metropolitan cultural politics. In a world where an ethical choice between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is impossible to make, Fury achieves an ethical act of treason against both. The next chapter scrutinizes Mark Renton's "ripping off" of his best mates and his critique of capitalism in Trainspotting and Porno. If Renton betrays his friends in order to leave the plan(e) of capitalism in the original novel, he satirizes the trustworthiness of trust in Porno by crushing his best mate's blind trust in business "ethics" and by ripping him off again. The last full chapter updates the link between aesthetics and ethics in post-AIDS contexts in Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty. In portraying without judgment beautiful, dark-skinned, dying homosexual bodies, Hollinghurst's novel "fleshes out" the traditional sphere of aesthetics that denies the low and impure pleasures frequently paired with gay sex.