Dylan Thomas

by John Goodby (Editor), Christopher Wigginton (Editor)

Overview

A collection of essays on one of the twentieth century's most popular yet critically neglected authors, this book explores the full range of Thomas's work. It uses approaches - such as marxism, feminism and deconstruction - previously neglected by critics and focuses on his complex relationships with surrealism, modernism, Wales, popular culture, the USA and his own contemporaries. In doing so, it restores Thomas to his rightful place as a major twentieth century literary figure and cultural icon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333803950
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	04/13/2017
Series:	New Casebooks , #1
Edition description:	2001
Pages:	235
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.53(d)

About the Author

CHRIS WIGGINTON is Head of the School of English at Trinity College, Carmarthen.

JOHN GOODBY is lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea.
CHRIS WIGGINTON is Head of the School of English at Trinity College, Carmarthen.

JOHN GOODBY is lecturer in English at the University of Wales Swansea.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
General Editors' Preface
Introduction
'The Little Arisen Original Monster': Dylan Thomas's Sour Grapes; S. Smith
The Lips of Time; S. Crehan
'Daughters of Darkness': Dylan Thomas and the Celebration of the Female; K. Gramich
'Birth and Copulation and Death': Gothic Modernism and Surregionalism in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas; C. Wigginton
The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Welsh Contexts, Narrative and the Language of Modernism; W. Davies
'Death is all Metaphor': Dylan Thomas's Radical Morbidity; I. Phillips
'Shot from the Locks': Poetry, Mourbaning, Deaths and Entrances ; S. Vine
Questions of Identity: The Movement and Fern Hill ; J. A. Davies
'Oh, for Our Vanished Youth': Avoiding Adulthood in the Later Stories of Dylan Thomas; J. Williams
'Very Profound and Very Box-Office': The Later Poems and Under Milk Wood ; J. Goodby
Further Reading
Notes on Contributors
Index.

Editorial Reviews

"This superb new biography by John Goodby and Chris Wigginton, a distillation of their work on Dylan Thomas over 25 years, is the first to take for granted his “acute intelligence” in rising to the challenge of his “inexhaustible” poetry. Anyone eager to hear all about his rambunctious ribaldry and transatlantic antics will find slim pickings, as poem after poem - from the seismic lyrics of the inspired teenager to the magnificent ‘Prologue’ of his final year - comes into startling focus, in an original and convincing reading of Thomas’s life and art."

James Keery

"In an astonishing statement Dylan Thomas declared “So many modern poets take the living flesh as their object, and, by their clever dissection, turn it into a carcass. I prefer to take the dead flesh, and . . . build up a living flesh from it.” This describes exactly the achievement of Thomas’s revivalist biographers: they have conjured away the dead heritage body and the caricature of Thomas’s life and poetry as coagulated emissions, quickening both life and poems to track actively their intelligent and nervous response to their environments, social, intellectual and literary. This book is the latest stage in Thomas’s restoration as a serious writer, whose work is shown newly as vital in our time."

John Wilkinson