John Goodby - Böcker

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.

This glossary offers an introduction to Irish culture and society and a route-map to further study. Designed specifically with undergraduates in mind, it contains around 400 short and accessible explanations of the key events, figures and concepts in Irish Studies since the pre-modern period.

Irish Poetry since 1950 is a survey of poetry, from Northern Ireland, the Republic, Britain, and the US. The five chapters of the book cover the 1950s, the 1960s, the early troubled period to 1976, the 1980s and the 1990s. Each poet is placed firmly within his or her historical and social contexts, with an emphasis on the response to the processes of modernization, the representation of violence, poetic form, and gender.

The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched.This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.

Between May 1930 and August 1935, Dylan Thomas kept numerous notebooks of poems. They contain the drafts of almost all of the work that would form his first two reputation-making collections, 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936), and many of those in his third collection, The Map of Love (1939). Thomas sold four of the notebooks, spanning May 1930 to May 1934, to the University of Buffalo in 1941. However, the existence of a fifth notebook, covering the period June 1934 to August 1935, was unknown until 2014, the centenary of his birth. The Fifth Notebook of Dylan Thomas makes this newly-discovered text available to readers and researchers for the first time. It contains the only existing MSS versions of Thomas’s most challenging poems, ‘I, in my intricate image’ and ‘Altarwise by owl-light’, and fourteen other early poems. It contains facsimiles and full transcripts of the originals, is annotated throughout, and has a full scholarly introduction. Exploring the contexts of these brilliant and experimental lyrics – many with substantial reworkings and variant passages – this landmark publication sheds new light on the creative practice of one of the most important and well-known poets of the twentieth century.

Like Shakespeare and Joyce before him, Dylan Thomas expanded our sense of what the English language can do. Rhythmically forceful yet subtly musical and full of memorable lines, his poems are anthology favourites; his 'play for voices' Under Milk Wood a modern classic. Much loved by The Beatles and Bob Dylan, he is a cultural icon and continues to inspire artists today.This new edition, released to commemorate the centenary of Thomas's birth, collects more of his poems together in a single volume than ever before. With recently discovered material and accessible critique from Dylan Thomas expert John Goodby, it looks at Thomas's body of work in a fresh light, taking us to the beating heart of his poetry.

Published in anticipation of the centenary of the poet’s birth, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas is the first study of the poet to show how his work may be read in terms of contemporary critical concerns, using theories of modernism, the body, gender, the carnivalesque, language, hybridity and the pastoral in order to view it in an original light. Moreover, in presenting a Dylan Thomas who has real significance for twenty-first century readers, it shows that such a reappraisal also requires us to re-think some of the ways in which all post-Waste Land British poetry has been read in the last few decades.

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.

This concise biography of Dylan Thomas incorporates the most recent research, challenging the legend of the dissolute bard to reveal a diligent, professional writer, author of some of the century’s greatest lyric poetry as well as short stories, film-scripts, letters and what is commonly agreed to be the greatest radio feature ever broadcast, Under Milk Wood. Thomas is viewed primarily through the lens of his writing, and his hybrid Anglo-Welsh origins are shown to be the source of his daring stylistic inventiveness. His work is set in its historical, cultural and social contexts – Depression-era Wales and 1930s literary London, Surrealism, the rise of fascism, the Second World War and the Blitz, and the Cold War – charting the path towards his final works, which offer a unique fusion of high art and popular culture.

Published in anticipation of the centenary of the poet’s birth, The Poetry of Dylan Thomas is the first study of the poet to show how his work may be read in terms of contemporary critical concerns, using theories of modernism, the body, gender, the carnivalesque, language, hybridity and the pastoral in order to view it in an original light. Moreover, in presenting a Dylan Thomas who has real significance for twenty-first century readers, it shows that such a reappraisal also requires us to re-think some of the ways in which all post-Waste Land British poetry has been read in the last few decades.