New Theoretical Perspectives on Dylan Thomas , livre ebook

N EW T HEORETICAL P ERSPECTIVES ON D YLAN T HOMAS
WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH
CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies
General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams ( CREW , Swansea University)
This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre 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)
N EW T HEORETICAL P ERSPECTIVES ON D YLAN T HOMAS
‘A W RITER OF W ORDS AND N OTHING E LSE ’?
WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH
E DITED BY K IERON S MITH AND R HIAN B ARFOOT
© 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
eISBN: 978-1-78683-522-2
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.

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover design: John Selway, The Hunchback in the Park (2001-2), acrylic on canvas. © The artist’s estate.
C ONTENTS
Series Editors’ Preface
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Notes on Contributors
1 Introduction: ‘[A] writer of words, and nothing else’
Kieron Smith and Rhian Barfoot
2 Shibboleth: For Dylan Thomas
Tomos Owen
3 The ‘Strange’ Wales of Dylan Thomas’s Short Stories
Tony Brown
4 ‘Tawe pressed in upon him’: Dylan Thomas, Modernity and the Rural-Urban Divide
Andrew Webb
5 The Comic Voices of Dylan Thomas
M. Wynn Thomas
6 ‘As long as he is all cucumber and hooves’: Dylan Thomas’s Comedy of the Unconscious
Rhian Barfoot
7 ‘Thrown back on the cutting floor’: Dylan Thomas and Film
John Goodby
8 ‘If We Are Gong to Call Peots Bda …’: Kingsley Amis and Dylan Thomas
James Keery
9 ‘[E]ruptions, farts, dampsquibs [and] barrelorgans’: Administrating Dylan Thomas in his Centenary Year
Kieron Smith
Bibliography
S ERIES E DITORS ’ P REFACE
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 variety 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 comparative 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
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book resulted from the many stimulating papers, panels, conversations 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, from The Poems of Dylan Thomas copyright © 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 New Directions Publishing Corp and David Higham Associates. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and David Higham Associates, introduction, notes, and editing copyright © 2014, 2017 by John Goodby. ‘A Story’, ‘A Visit to Grandpa’s’, ‘Extraordinary Little Cough’, ‘Just Like Little Dogs’, ‘Old Garbo’, ‘One Warm Saturday’, ‘Poetic Manifesto’, ‘The Burning Baby’, ‘The Dress’, ‘The Enemies’, ‘The Fight’, ‘The Followers’, ‘The Holy Six’, ‘The Lemon’, ‘The Map of Love’, ‘The Mouse and the Woman’, ‘The Orchards’, ‘The Peaches’, ‘The School for Witches’, ‘The Tree’, ‘The Vest’, ‘The Visitor’, ‘Who Do You Wish Was With Us?’ by Dylan Thomas, from The Collected Stories of Dylan Thomas , copyright ©1938, 1939, 1940, 1946, 1954, 1955, 1964, 1971 by New Directions Publishing Corp and David Higham Associates, copyright © 1952, 1953 by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1984 by the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and David Higham Associates. Under Milk Wood , by Dylan Thomas, copyright ©1954 by New Directions and David Higham Associates, copyright © 2013 by Walford Davies, copyright © 2013 by Ralph Maud. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp and David Higham Associates.
A BBREVIATIONS
Quotations from the poetry of Dylan Thomas are taken from Collected Poems , edited by John Goodby (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014); references to this will be made using the abbreviation CP , followed by the page number. Quotations from the stories of Dylan Thomas are taken from Collected Stories , edited by Walford Davies (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2014); references to these will be made using the abbreviation CS , followed by the page number. Quotations from the letters of Dylan Thomas are taken from The Collected Letters , edited by Paul Ferris (London: Dent, 1985); references to these will be made using the abbreviation CL followed