Chris Wigginton

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.

"Modernism from the Margins" is an accessible and challenging account of the 1930s writing of two of the most popular authors of the time. Locating the work of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas historically, the book questions standard accounts of the period as Auden-dominated and offers an inclusive and theoretical account of the engagement of both writers with the varieties of Modernism. It is the first reading at length of either MacNeice's or Thomas's work in the light of literary theory, and one of only a handful of texts to look at the writing of the 1930s in these terms. This book is an important contribution to contemporary discussions of both of these writers, and of the general issues of modernism, postmodernism, literary identity, and cultural identity it raises.