(Applause Books). The first complete collection of Dylan Thomas's screenplays offers a unique portrait of his life and times as a professional film writer.

An accessible introduction to the life and work of the inventive Welsh poet. Dylan Thomas—author of some of the century’s greatest poetry, stories, and film scripts as well as one of the greatest radio features ever broadcast, Under Milk Wood—is often characterized as self-indulgent. This concise and up-to-date biography challenges this depiction with a fresh portrait of the artist as a consummate professional. John Goodby and Chris Wigginton locate the source of Thomas’s daring and inventive style in the poet’s Anglo-Welsh origins as well as his historical, cultural, and social contexts: the Great Depression and 1930s literary London, surrealism, World War II, and Cold War popular culture. The result is a revealing and fresh introduction to the life and work of this important Welsh writer.

Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration is a unique collection of specially commissioned essays celebrating the poet's life and work one hundred years after his birth in 1914. Edited by his granddaughter, Hannah Ellis, who introduces each section by theme, the book is divided into three parts concerning Thomas's early years, later life and his lasting legacy. Highlights include essays from noted biographers Andrew Lycett and David N. Thomas, National Poet for Wales Gillian Clarke on Under Milk Wood, and poetry by Archbishop Emeritus Rowan Williams. The book also includes essays by poet Owen Sheers and BBC Radio 6 presenter Cerys Matthews, as well as numerous testimonies and poems from the likes of former President of the United States Jimmy Carter, Phillip Pullman and actor Michael Sheen. With a foreword by comedian and former Monty Python Terry Jones, Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration is a rich and personal reflection on the lasting legacy of Britain's greatest poet.

An important reappraisal of the poetry of Dylan Thomas in terms of modern critical theory.

Discovering Dylan Thomas is a companion to Dylan Thomas’s published and notebook poems. It includes hitherto-unseen material contained in the recently-discovered fifth notebook, alongside poems, drafts and critical material including summaries of the critical reception of individual poems. The introductory essay considers the task of editing and annotating Thomas, the reception of the Collected Poems and the state of the Dylan Thomas industry, and the nature of Thomas’s reading, ‘influences’, allusions and intertextuality. It is followed by supplementary poems, including juvenilia and the notebook poems ‘The Woman Speaks’, original versions of ‘Grief thief of time’ and ‘I fellowed sleep’, and ‘Jack of Christ’, all of which were omitted from the Collected Poems. These are followed by annotations beginning with a discussion of Thomas’s juvenilia, and the relationship between plagiarism and parody in his work; poem-by-poem entries offer glosses, new material from the fifth notebook, critical histories for each poem, and variants of poems such as ‘Holy Spring’ and ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’). The closing appendices deal with text and publication details for the collections Thomas published in his lifetime, the provenance and contents of the fifth notebook, and errata for the hardback edition of the Collected Poems.

Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves--and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy--against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors--Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.

A collection of essays on Dylan Thomas, reading culture and his place in modernist studiesReclining quietly with a book; an ear glued to the Hi-Fi; sifting a library stack; the TV flickering; a website gone live Few poets have inspired such remarkable scenes and modes of interpretation as Dylan Thomas. Our means of access and response to his work have never been more eclectic, and this collection sheds new light on what it means to 'read' such a various art. In thinking beyond the parameters of life writing and lingering interpretative communities, Reading Dylan Thomas attends in detail to the problems and pleasures of deciphering Thomas in the twenty-first century, teasing out his debts and effects, tracing his influence on later artists, and suggesting ways to understand his own idiosyncratic reading practices. From short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to films, manuscripts to paintings, the material considered in this volume lays the ground for a new consideration of Thomas's formal versatility, and his distinctive relation to literary modernism. Key FeaturesEvaluates the breadth of Thomas's creative practice, from short stories to memoirs, poems to broadcasts, letters to films, manuscripts to paintingsDraws on recently discovered manuscripts and archival material in Britain and North AmericaA distinctive combination of cultural history, close reading, and critical theory