Reference Guide to Short Fiction provides study and commentary on the most instrumental writers of short fiction through the 20th century. International in scope, this single scholarly volume includes 779 entries on 377 authors and 402 short stories.

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poem, and variants of poems such as ‘Holy Spring’ and ‘On a Wedding Anniversary’ (including a magnificent, previously unpublished first draft of ‘A Refusal to Mourn’).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

Containing over 25,000 entries, this unique volume will be absolutely indispensable for all those with an interest in Britain in the twentieth century. Accessibly arranged by theme, with helpful introductions to each chapter, a huge range of topics is covered. There is a comprehensiveindex.

Through an analysis of the artist figures in Thomas's early experimental prose, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, Adventures in the Skin Trade, and Under Milk Wood, Mayer illustrates that he was continually exploring and re-evaluating his vocation, the nature of his chosen medium, and the world itself. Mayer links Thomas's prose works to his poetry through the blending of lyric and narrative strategies. As well, she examines Thomas's self-conscious concerns about his relationship to his modernist contemporaries. Mayer goes beyond the traditional New Critical approaches that dominate Thomas scholarship and uses contemporary critical theory to offer new insights into the complexity and ambiguity of a major twentieth-century writer.

`That brilliant commentator on Dylan, John Ackerman' - Andrew Sinclair, Dylan Thomas: Poet of his People John Ackerman's highly acclaimed study of the poems and prose works of Dylan Thomas traces his development as a writer, linking this for the first time with his Welsh background. The formative influence of Swansea on the young poet, his family roots in West Wales and the childhood visits to Fernhill farm and the nearby Blaen Cwm cottage are all included, together with the Boat House anhd Laugharne, the absorbing village life and the inspiration of its now famous land- and sea-scapes. The impact of Welsh nonconformity and the chapel, and the radical politics of Wales are also explored as important influences on the poet's career. The 1994 preface, together with the introduction, throws new light on later poems like 'Prologue', the poet's work in film, broadcasting, as reader and as lecturer, while his own newly-discovered words, sharp and witty and with a poet's eye highlight his life, times and craft. The kaleidoscope of his changing worlds is seen in his homes in Wales and England, and his need in each one for a separate place to write, whether the hillside shed in Laugharne or a gypsy caravan in Oxfordshire or Camden.

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.

American Literature in Transition, 1950–1960 explores the under-recognized complexity and variety of 1950s American literature by focalizing discussions through a series of keywords and formats that encourage readers to draw fresh connections among literary form and concepts, institutions, cultures, and social phenomena important to the decade. The first section draws attention to the relationship between literature and cultural phenomena that were new to the 1950s. The second section demonstrates the range of subject positions important in the 1950s, but still not visible in many accounts of the era. The third section explores key literary schools or movements associated with the decade, and explains how and why they developed at this particular cultural moment. The final section focuses on specific forms or genres that grew to special prominence during the 1950s. Taken together, the chapters in the four sections not only encourage us to rethink familiar texts and figures in new lights, but they also propose new archives for future study of the decade.