A collection of essays on Dylan Thomas, reading culture and his place in modernist studies Reclining 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 Features Evaluates 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

How refreshing to read criticism so dazzlingly equipped to appreciate the adventurous nature of his manifold achievements and so fully alive to Thomas's sophisticated ground-breaking linguistic practices. This is subtle, insightful criticism truly answerable to the work of an overlooked master of late international modernism who was also a striking precursor of post-modernist experimentation. -- M. Wynn Thomas, Swansea University

Edward Allen is a Lecturer at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.