Transatlantic Vistas

Engagements with the Literatures of Wales and the United States

Author(s) M. Wynn Thomas

Editor(s) Kirsti Bohata,Daniel G. Williams

Language: English

Genre(s): Literary Criticism

  • August 2024 · 408 pages ·216x138mm

  • · Paperback - 9781837721597
  • · eBook - pdf - 9781837721603
  • · eBook - epub - 9781837721610

About The Book

An edited collection of essays, interviews, and book reviews by M. Wynn Thomas.

For more than half a century, M. Wynn Thomas has been Wales’s foremost literary critic. His ground-breaking work – on subjects ranging from Welsh Puritanism to Walt Whitman, from religious Dissent to contemporary poetry – has opened up new vistas and literary correspondences for his readers. Thomas’s writings combine a deep historical knowledge, a commitment to pluralism and a relationship to the literary text that is both sympathetic in approach and detailed in analysis.

Made up of previously unpublished and uncollected essays, interviews, and reviews on Welsh and American writers, the writings in Transatlantic Vistas engage with some of the abiding interests of Thomas’s career: Walt Whitman, Dylan Thomas, R. S. Thomas, and American authors such as Charles Bukowski, Rita Dove, Anne Stevenson and more. Including a foreword by Helen Vendler and essays by Daniel G. Williams and Kirsti Bohata, this volume celebrates M. Wynn Thomas’s immense contribution as a literary and intellectual historian, critic, translator, lecturer, institution builder, editor, broadcaster and literary executor as he enters his eightieth year.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Foreword by Helen Vendler
Introduction by Daniel G. Williams
On Walt Whitman
‘Till I hit upon a name’: Calamus and the language of love
Whitman and the Labouring Classes
States United and United States: Whitman’s national vision in 1855
Whitman, Tennyson, and the poetry of old age
The pioneer: D. H. Lawrence’s Whitman.
On Dylan Thomas
‘A Sweet Union?’: Dylan Thomas and Post-War American Poetry.
‘There’s words’: Dylan Thomas, Swansea and language
On R. S. Thomas
The Real Manafon of R. S. Thomas
Bury My Heart: R. S. Thomas and Native America
Interviews
Rita Dove
Jorie Graham
Helen Vendler
Reviews
Dannie Abse
Charles Bukowski
Jorie Graham
Geoffrey Hill
Gwyneth Lewis
W. S. Merwin
Sharon Olds
Keidrych Rhys
Anne Stevenson
Afterword by Kirsti Bohata
Bibliography of M. Wynn Thomas since 2004
Index

About the Author(s)

Author(s): M. Wynn Thomas

M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English, and Emyr Humphreys Professor of Welsh Writing in English, at Swansea University.

Read more

About the Editor(s)

Author(s): Kirsti Bohata

Professor Kirsti Bohata is a Director at CREW, Swansea University.

Read more

Author(s): Daniel G. Williams

Daniel G. Williams is Professor of English and Director of the Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales at Swansea University. He is the author of Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (2015), Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales (2012) and Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: from Arnold to Du Bois (2006).

Read more