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\"In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints-of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself-and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes, the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements. Yeats and Afterwords proceeds in three stages, involving past-pastness, present-pastness, and future-pastness. The first, \"The Last Romantics,\" examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section, \"Yeats and Afterwords,\" looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments, insights, and styles to critical negation, crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section, \"Yeats's Aftertimes,\" explores how, thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention, his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history, hard to follow and harder to avoid, and later writers often found themselves producing words that were, in some sense, his afterwords. \"This is a groundbreaking collection that will have a major impact on Yeats studies and will be useful for scholars working more broadly in Irish and modernist studies.\" -Rob Doggett, SUNY Geneseo\"-- Provided by publisher.

In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints-of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself-and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes, the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements. Yeats and Afterwords proceeds in three stages, involving past-pastness, present-pastness, and future-pastness. The first, \"The Last Romantics,\" examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section, \"Yeats and Afterwords,\" looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments, insights, and styles to critical negation, crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section, \"Yeats's Aftertimes,\" explores how, thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention, his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history, hard to follow and harder to avoid, and later writers often found themselves producing words that were, in some sense, his afterwords. \"This ground-breaking collection of essays examines Yeats's sense of historical belatedness as theme, as trope, in formal embodiments such as the afterword, and in his strong critical shaping of literary history. In doing so, it historicizes Yeats's own sense of history with unparalleled depth, while seriously acting on the acceptance that form is itself historical. In showing how Yeats's moulding of the past was also the creation of a future, it offers a range of productive new starting-points for the study of this great poet.\" -Edward Larrissy, emeritus, Queen's University, Belfast \"Although Yeats and Afterwords focuses broadly on questions of inheritance and legacy, it marks a new departure because it re-conceptualizes belatedness in a more complex and more theoretically useful manner than prior studies. What impressed me most about the collection is that the theoretical paradigms introduced at the outset are at once defining and fluid. The editors conceptualize belatedness in such a way that this insight gives structure to the volume, even as it allows for a multiplicity of readings. This volume will have a major impact on Yeats studies and will be useful for scholars working more broadly in Irish and modernist studies.\" -Rob Doggett, SUNY Geneseo  

In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints-of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself-and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time, depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes, the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements. Yeats and Afterwords proceeds in three stages, involving past-pastness, present-pastness, and future-pastness. The first, \"The Last Romantics,\" examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section, \"Yeats and Afterwords,\" looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments, insights, and styles to critical negation, crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section, \"Yeats's Aftertimes,\" explores how, thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention, his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history, hard to follow and harder to avoid, and later writers often found themselves producing words that were, in some sense, his afterwords. \"This ground-breaking collection of essays examines Yeats's sense of historical belatedness as theme, as trope, in formal embodiments such as the afterword, and in his strong critical shaping of literary history. In doing so, it historicizes Yeats's own sense of history with unparalleled depth, while seriously acting on the acceptance that form is itself historical. In showing how Yeats's moulding of the past was also the creation of a future, it offers a range of productive new starting-points for the study of this great poet.\" -Edward Larrissy, emeritus, Queen's University, Belfast \"Although Yeats and Afterwords focuses broadly on questions of inheritance and legacy, it marks a new departure because it re-conceptualizes belatedness in a more complex and more theoretically useful manner than prior studies. What impressed me most about the collection is that the theoretical paradigms introduced at the outset are at once defining and fluid. The editors conceptualize belatedness in such a way that this insight gives structure to the volume, even as it allows for a multiplicity of readings. This volume will have a major impact on Yeats studies and will be useful for scholars working more broadly in Irish and modernist studies.\" -Rob Doggett, SUNY Geneseo

This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense. First-time readers of Yeats as well as more advanced scholars will welcome this comprehensive account of Yeats's career with its useful chronological outline and survey of the most important trends in Yeats scholarship. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential introduction for students and teachers of Yeats.

This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense. First-time readers of Yeats as well as more advanced scholars will welcome this comprehensive account of Yeats's career with its useful chronological outline and survey of the most important trends in Yeats scholarship. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential introduction for students and teachers of Yeats.

This dissertation argues that representations of gender and representations of nationality are interdependent in Yeats's work, and charts the changing set of formulations through which some of his texts articulate that interdependence. The project also advances the historical claim that Yeats's working life spans a period when mutually constructed discourses about women and Ireland were more closely interconnected than at any other time in the cultural history of Ireland and England. Chapter One examines the confluence of race and gender which characterized turn of the century representations of Ireland and the Irish in the discourse of Celticism. This chapter argues that Yeats's anxieties about the Celtic movement's origins in and structural similarities to British imperialism appear as a set of ambivalent postures towards femininity in his Celtic writings. Chapter Two discusses Yeats's vexed relationship with popular Irish nationalism as it is illustrated in his early plays and their reception. It argues that Yeats's representations of figures like Kathleen ni Houlihan, which Irish nationalism produced in response to specific Irish power struggles, express a combination of attraction and repulsion for the Irish political movement, simultaneously suppressing and reinscribing the class and sectarian divisions between the Irish and Anglo-Irish. Chapter Three traces Yeats's engagement with Anglo-Irish culture as a kindred aristocracy, arguing that his use of the family dynasty as a metaphor for Anglo-Irish tradition expresses the disintegration of that tradition rather than its coherence. Yeats constructed Anglo-Irish dynastic continuity as dependent upon the social construction of femininity and the regulation of female sexuality, and figured Anglo-Irish decline through representations of sexual misalliance and racial degeneration. Chapter Four takes up an alternate mood in the middle and late Yeats that articulates criticisms of the Irish Free State's hegemonic definition of Irish identity, which was founded in large part upon the severe regulation of women and sexuality. Yeats resists this Irish identity through representations of transgressive female desire and rebellious feminine personae which leave the Free State's equation of sex with sin intact and assert an alternative metaphysics which incorporates sexuality and the body.

The Cambridge anthropologist Jane Harrison once posed a question that remains as challenging today as when it was first framed. She asked why “women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex - why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?” For Yeats, whose frustrated devotion to an unattainable Muse dominated his life and his poetry, women were more often a dream than a terror. Nevertheless the feminist poet Adrienne Rich sees him as exemplary of the asymmetrical power relation between male subject and female object:And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth - the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.Rich describes three distinct poetic modes: the carpe diem genre, which threatens the mistress with the ravages of old age in order to pressure her into bed; the “cruel mistress” trope, which laments her refusal to comply; and the idealization of the dead beloved made fashionable by Dante and Petrarch. All three modes exemplify the tradition, previously noted by Jane Harrison, in which men write and women are written about.