Dylan Thomas

by John Goodby, Chris Wigginton

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781789149326
Publisher:	Reaktion Books, Limited
Publication date:	12/13/2024
Series:	Critical Lives
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.12(w) x 7.87(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Goodby is professor of arts and culture at Sheffield Hallam University. The leading authority on Dylan Thomas, he has written extensively on his work and edited his Collected Poems.


Chris Wigginton is pro vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University. His books include Modernism from the Margins: The 1930’s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas.

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