Books in the Writing Wales in English series

In Wales Unchained Daniel G. Williams explores how Welsh writers, politicians and intellectuals have defined themselves - and have been defined by others - since the early twentieth century. Whether by exploring ideas of race in the 1930s or reflecting on the metaphoric uses of boxing, asking what it means to inhabit the 'American century' or probing the linguistic bases of cultural identity, Williams writes with a rare blend of theoretical sophistication and accessible clarity. This book discusses Rhys Davies in relation to D. H. Lawrence, explores the simultaneous impact that Dylan Thomas and saxophonist Charlie Parker had on the Beat Generation in 1950s America, and juxtaposes the uses made of class and ethnicity in the thought of Aneurin Bevan and Paul Robeson. Transatlantic in scope and comparative in method, this book will engage readers interested in literature, politics, history and contemporary cultural debate.

Throughout the history of Thomas's critical reception, psychoanalytic interpretations have been applied that have privileged the psychosexual over the psycho-linguistic elements of his work. The wealth of sexual and pseudo-sexual imagery has acquired a negative charge, and has been used to evidence claims that Thomas was the epiphon of his own disturbed psyche, thus reducing the poetry to the expression of the poet's schizoid neuroses. Avoiding the biography-based approaches that have dominated hitherto, Liberating Dylan Thomas rescues his early poetry from the position of servitude to the discursive mastery of psychoanalysis. Placing the poetry and psychoanalysis together in a mutually illuminating dialogue, this book clearly demonstrates the ways in which the vital connection between post-Freudian psychoanalysis and Thomas's early poetry can be articulated without reductive simplification.

This book uses models of 'world literature' to present this 'quintessentially English' writer as a pioneering figure in an Anglophone Welsh literary tradition, a controversial reading that contributes to the present-day reconfiguration of cultural relations between Wales, England, Scotland