New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas

Kieron Smith and Rhian Barfoot

Description

Kieron Smith, John Ormond’s Organic Mosaic: Poetry, Documentary, Nation, University of Wales Press, 2019

　

Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: rescuing a poet from psycho-sexual servitude, University of Wales Press, 2014

　

Other publications:

　

Kieron Smith, Kirsti Bohata, Jon Anderson, Jeffrey Morgan, ‘It’ll be our own little Wales out there’: re-situating Bardsey Island for post-devolution Wales in Fflur Dafydd’s Twenty Thousand Saints’, Island Studies Journal 12:2 (2017), 317-328.

　

Kieron Smith, ‘Madawaska Valley: John Ormond’s lost film at the National Film Board of Canada’, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 25:1 (2017), 27-45.

　

Kieron Smith, ‘Wales and the BBC’s Long Revolution’, Raymond Williams Kenkyu (2013), 71-82.

Kieron Smith, ‘Constructing the Map: Welsh Criticism of Caradoc Evans’, Almanac, 16 (2012), 89-120.

Dylan Thomas’s reputation precedes him. In keeping with his claim that he held ‘a beast, an angel, and a madman in him’, interpretations of his work have ranged from solemn adoration to exaggerated mythologising. His many voices continue to reverberate across culture and the arts: from poetry and letters, to popular music and Hollywood film. However, this wide and sometimes controversial renown has occasionally hindered serious analysis of his writing. Counterbalancing the often-misleading popular reputation, this book showcases eight new critical perspectives on Thomas’s work. It is the first to provide in one volume a critical overview of the multifaceted range of his output, from the poetry, prose and correspondence to his work for wartime propaganda filmmaking, his late play for voices Under Milk Wood, and his reputation in letters and wider society. The whole proves that Thomas was much more than, to use his own dubious self-description, 'a writer of words, and nothing else’.

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations Used
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: ‘[A] writer of words, and nothing else’, Kieron Smith and Rhian Barfoot
Shibboleth: For Dylan Thomas, Tomos Owen
The ‘Strange’ Wales of Dylan Thomas’s Short Stories, Tony Brown
‘Tawe pressed in upon him’: Dylan Thomas, Modernity and the Rural-Urban Divide, Andrew Webb
The comic voices of Dylan Thomas, M. Wynn Thomas
‘As long as he is all cucumber and hooves’: Dylan Thomas’s Comedy of the Unconscious, Rhian Barfoot
‘Thrown back on the cutting floor’: Dylan Thomas and film, John Goodby
‘If We Are Gong to Call Peots Bda [...]’: Kingsley Amis and Dylan Thomas’, James Keery
‘[E]ruptions, farts, dampsquibs [and] barrelorgans’: Administrating Dylan Thomas in his centenary year, Kieron Smith 205
Bibliography

Sujets

• Literary Criticism

Informations

• Publié par: University of Wales Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786835215
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

CREWseries of Critical and Scholarly Studies General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams (CREW, Swansea University)

ThisCREWseries is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of theCentre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

Other titles in the series Stephen Knight,A Hundred Years of Fiction(9780708318461) Barbara PrysWilliams,TwentiethCentury Autobiography(9780708318911) Kirsti Bohata,Postcolonialism Revisited(9780708318928) Chris Wigginton,Modernism from the Margins(9780708319277) Linden Peach,Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction(9780708319987) Sarah Prescott,EighteenthCentury Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (9780708320532) Hywel Dix,After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the BreakUp of Britain (9780708321539) Matthew Jarvis,Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry(9780708321522) Harri Garrod Roberts,Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature(9780708321690) Diane Green,Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist(9780708322178) M. Wynn Thomas,In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (9780708322253) Linden Peach,The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (9780708322161) Daniel Westover,R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography(9780708324134) Jasmine Donahaye,Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine(9780708324837) Judy Kendall,Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry(9780708324035) Damian Walford Davies,Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English(9780708324769) Daniel G. Williams,Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (9780708319871) Andrew Webb,Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature(9780708326220) Alyce von Rothkirch,J. O. Francis, realist drama and ethics: Culture, place and nation (9781783160709) Rhian Barfoot,Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from PsychoSexual Servitude(9781783161843) Daniel G. Williams,Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century(9781783162123) M. Wynn Thomas,The Nations of Wales 1890–1914(9781783168378) Richard McLauchlan,Saturday’s Silence: R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading (9781783169207) Bethan M. Jenkins,Between Wales and England: Anglophone Welsh Writing of the Eighteenth Century(9781786830296) M. Wynn Thomas,All that is Wales: The Collected Essays of M. Wynn Thomas (9781786830883) Laura Wainwright,New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing, 1930–1949 (9781786832177) Siriol McAvoy (ed.),Locating Lynette Roberts(9781786833822)

New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas

‘A Writer of Words and Nothing Else’?

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

Edited by Kieron Smith and Rhian Barfoot

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS 2020

© The Contributors, 2020

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, University Registry, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3NS.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9781786835208 eISBN: 9781786835215

The right of The Contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typeset by Marie Doherty Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Melksham

Series Editors’ Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Notes on Contributors

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Introduction: ‘[A] writer of words, and nothing else’ Kieron Smith and Rhian Barfoot

Shibboleth: For Dylan Thomas Tomos Owen

The ‘Strange’ Wales of Dylan Thomas’s Short Stories Tony Brown

‘Tawe pressed in upon him’: Dylan Thomas, Modernity and the RuralUrban Divide Andrew Webb

The Comic Voices of Dylan Thomas M. Wynn Thomas

‘As long as he is all cucumber and hooves’: Dylan Thomas’s Comedy of the Unconscious Rhian Barfoot

‘Thrown back on the cutting floor’: Dylan Thomas and Film John Goodby

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Contents

‘If We Are Gong to Call Peots Bda . . .’: Kingsley Amis 133 and Dylan Thomas James Keery

‘[E]ruptions, farts, dampsquibs [and] barrelorgans’: Administrating Dylan Thomas in his Centenary Year Kieron Smith

Bibliography Index

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sERIES eDITORS’ PREFacE

The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that reflects the richness and var iety of the Englishlanguage literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within com parative and transnational contexts.

Professor Kirsti Bohata and Professor Daniel G. Williams Founding Editor: Professor M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15) CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) Swansea University

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This book resulted from the many stimulating papers, panels, con versations and ideas shared during ‘Dylan Unchained: the Dylan Thomas Centenary Conference’ at Swansea University, September 2014. The editors wish to acknowledge all delegates who contributed to that important event. We especially wish to thank the conference organiser, Professor Kirsti Bohata. Warm thanks also to all of the contributors to this collection for their excellent work and, indeed, tremendous patience, while the manuscript was being prepared. In addition, our gratitude to Sarah Lewis of the University of Wales Press, for her help and support at every stage of the project. The editors and the publisher wish to thank the following for the permission to use the copyright material: ‘A Dream of Winter’, ‘Altarwise by owllight’, ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’, ‘And Death shall have no Dominion’, ‘Ceremony After a Fire Raid’, ‘Especially when the October Wind’, ‘Fern Hill’, ‘I, in my intricate image’, ‘I see the boys of summer’, ‘In the White Giant’s Thigh’, ‘Our eunuch dreams’, ‘Over St John’s Hill’, ‘Poem in October’, ‘Poem on his birthday’, ‘The force that through the green fuse’, ‘The hunchback in the park’, ‘Then was my neophyte’, ‘Twentyfour years’, ‘When, like a running grave’ by Dylan Thomas, fromThe Poems of Dylan Thomascopyright © 1952, 1953 by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1937, 1945, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1962, 1966, 1967, 1971, 1977 by the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1938, 1939, 1943, 1946, 1971, 2003 by