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.

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poem, and variants of poems such as ‘Holy Spring’ and ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’).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.

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.

1. The book is in keeping with contemporary developments in literary criticism and interpretation. 2. The book is the first to offer a comprehensive critical overview of Thomas’s entire output. 3. It provides exciting new commentaries on cultural appropriations and interpretations of Thomas in the media, letters, and popular culture. 4. It contains work by some of the leading voices in the fields of Thomas studies and Welsh Writing in English. 5. It offers key insights into the Welsh contexts of Thomas’s work and legacy.

The book attempts, for the first time, to demonstrate a vital connection between Thomas’s poetry and post-Freudian psychoanalysis. This will benefit readers by helping shed new and illuminating light on the writing and will help close the gap that sadly still exists between Thomas’s critical and popular receptions. Close textual analysis of poems that have to date received only scant critical attention e.g. ‘Today this insect’ The Notebooks have received only scant critical attention, and have been subordinated to a purely minor role. Here, however the Notebooks are re-visited and re-evaluated, because the text of these four manuscript exercise books, provides us with a highly significant and revealing document.

Providing a broad, definitive account of how the 'archival turn' in humanities scholarship has shaped modernist studies, this book also functions as an ongoing 'practitioner's toolkit' (including useful bibliographical resources) and a guide to avenues for future work. Archival work in modernist studies has revolutionised the discipline in the past two decades, fuelled by innovative and ambitious scholarly editing projects and a growing interest in fresh types of archival sources and evidence that can re-contextualise modernist writing. Several theoretical trends have prompted this development, including the focus on compositional process within genetic manuscript studies, the emphasis on book history, little magazines, and wider publishing contexts, and the emphasis on new material evidence and global and 'non-canonical' authors and networks within the 'New Modernist Studies'. This book provides a guide to the variety of new archival research that will point to fresh avenues and connect the methodologies and resources being developed across modernist studies. Offering a variety of single-author case studies on recent archival developments and editing projects, including Samuel Beckett, Hart Crane, H.D., James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf, it also offers a range of thematic essays that examine an array of underused sources as well as the challenges facing archival researchers of modernism

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

Dylan Thomas's letters bring the poet and his times to life in a way that almost no biography can. First published by J.M. Dent in 1985, Thomas's Collected Letters received exceptional reviews, both for the scholarship of the editor, and for the quality of the collection. This new edition will bring the letters back into print at a time when interest is renewed in the life of this exceptional writer. The letters begin in the poet's schooldays, and end just before his death in New York at the age of 39. In between, he loved, wrote, drank, begged and borrowed his way through a flamboyant life. He was an enthusiastic critic of other writers' work and the letters are full of his thoughts on his own work and on his friends, as well as unguarded and certainly unpolitical comments on the work of his contemporaries - T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender among others. ('Spender should be kicked ... Day-Lewis hissed in public and have his balls beaten with a toffee hammer') More than a hundred new letters have been added since Paul Ferris edited the first edition of the Collected Letters in 1985. They cast Thomas's adolescence in Swansea and his love affair with Caitlin into sharper focus. Thomas's letters tell a remarkable story, each letter taking the reader a little further along the path of the poet's self-destruction, but written with such verve and lyricism that somehow the reader's sympathies never quite abandon him.