Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition

Edward Thomas is an important figure in the English literary canon, a major twentieth-century poet, he was also one of England's most experienced and respected Edwardian and Georgian critics, and an observer of the countryside second to none. Although he died at the age of only 39, his prose output was massive and encompassed a range of genres: biography, autobiography, essays, reviews, fiction, nature books, travel writings, and anthologies. While Thomas's stature as a poet is widely appreciated, his prose works have yet to be given their critical due - in large part because scholarly editions have hitherto been lacking. Edward Thomas: Prose Writings: A Selected Edition shows that Thomas's prose deserves to be much better known, by literary scholars but also the general reading public. This six-volume edition establishes him as one of the most important prose writers in English, who contributed remarkable ideas and representations of the self and community, the landscape and ecology, literature and history, the spiritual and artistic life. It is the definitive edition of Thomas's prose and a significant scholarly resource for the twenty-first century. The second volume contains Thomas's writings on England and Wales, and is mostly concerned with his response to the countryside. It covers the entirety of his writing career, showing the development of his identity and style. Works appear in chronological order within the volume, which begins with a comprehensive introduction, providing biographical details, an account of the circumstances of composition, historical contextualisation of the volume's themes and concerns, and an interpretation based on original research. Thomas's complex and brilliant prose, intricately woven using many quotations and allusions, is elucidated by a detailed headnote at the start of each work, and by extensive annotation.

Guy Cuthbertson is a lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. Previously, he was a teaching fellow at the University of St Andrews, a college lecturer at Oxford University, and a lecturer at Swansea University. He was an undergraduate at St Andrews and then a graduate student at Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Edward Thomas. He has published widely on Thomas, edits the Edward Thomas Fellowship's journal, and edited, with Lucy Newlyn, Branch-Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (London: Enitharmon, 2007). He is also writing a biography of Wilfred Owen for Yale University Press. Lucy Newlyn is Professor of English at Oxford University, and a Fellow and Tutor at St Edmund Hall. She has published widely on English Romantic literature, including three books with Oxford University Press, and The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge. Her book Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (OUP, 2000) won the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay prize in 2001. She has published articles on Edward Thomas, and her edition of his xford was published by Signal in 2005. Her first collection of poems, Ginnel, was published by Oxford Poets, Carcanet in 2005. She is currently writing a book about William and Dorothy Wordsworth's creative collaboration for Oxford University Press.