Description: 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 Made up of previously unpublished and uncollected essays, interviews, and reviews on Welsh and American writers, the essays in Transatlantic Vistas engage with some of the abiding interests of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.Brief description: Kirsti Bohata is professor of English and co-director of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales, Swansea University.
Review Quotes: "M. Wynn Thomas is such a giant among scholars that the scale of his achievement is difficult to see in the round. His mastery over at least four literary fields--the American, the Welsh-language, Welsh writing in English and the European traditions--is breathtaking. His criticism is above all humane but written with the clarity of the author's commitment to democratic discourse. Without him, our understanding of Wales's literary history and its connection to the world would be definitively impoverished."-- "Gwyneth Lewis, former National Poet of Wales"