The Oxford Handbook of W.B. Yeats

by Arrington, Lauren; Campbell, Matthew

• ISBN13: 9780198834670
• ISBN10: 0198834675
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-09-20
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

The forty-two chapters in this book consider Yeats's early toil, his practical and esoteric concerns as his career developed, his friends and enemies, and how he was and is understood. This Handbook brings together critics and writers who have considered what Yeats wrote and how he wrote, moving between texts and their contexts in ways that will lead the reader through Yeats's multiple selves as poet, playwright, public figure, and mystic.

It assembles a variety of views and adds to a sense of dialogue, the antinomian or deliberately-divided way of thinking that Yeats relished and encouraged. This volume puts that sense of a living dialogue in tune both with the history of criticism on Yeats and also with contemporary critical and ethical debates, not shirking the complexities of Yeats's more uncomfortable political positions or personal life. It provides one basis from which future Yeats scholarship can continue to participate in the fascination of all the contributors here in the satisfying difficulty of this great writer.

Author Biography

Lauren Arrington, Professor of English, Maynooth University,Matthew Campbell, Professor of English, University of York

Lauren Arrington is Professor of English at Maynooth University where she also serves as Head of Department. She is the author of three monographs in the fields of twentieth-century literature and drama, most recently The Poets of Rapallo (OUP, 2021). Her writing has appeared in scholarly and popular publications including TLS and LitHub. From 2018 to 2021, she served as co-Director of the International Yeats Summer School.

Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is the author of Irish Poetry under the Union (CUP, 2013) and Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (CUP, 1999). He has edited or co-edited five other books, including The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry (2003) and Irish Literature in Transition, 1830-1880 (CUP, 2020). He was Co-Director of the Yeats International Summer School from 2013 to 2019.

Table of Contents

Preface
Part 1. Such Friends: Predecessors and Collaborators
1. Self-Making, Claire Lynch
2. Fairy and Folk Tales of Bedford Park, Seán Hewitt
3. 'Never to leave that valley': Sligo, Peter McDonald
4. Among the Victorians, Francis O'Gorman
5. Lady Gregory: Patronage, Collaboration, Mythopoeia, Nicholas Grene
6. John Quinn and the Literary Marketplace, Joseph Hassett
7. George Yeats, Margaret Mills Harper
8. The Writings of Jack Yeats, Nicholas Allen
Part 2. In and Through History
9. Ancient Ireland, Geraldine Parsons
10. The Ghost of Parnell, R.F. Foster
11. Renaissance Italy: 'courtly images', Edna Longley
12. Tradition and Phantasmagoria: Dante and Shakespeare
13. Talking back to history: From 'September 1913' to 'Easter, 1916', Geraldine Higgins
14. 'Knights of the Air': Flight and Modernity, Fran Brearton
15. Revolution and Counter-Revolution, David Dwan
16. Fascist Italy, Lauren Arrington
17. The Thirties: 'The day brings round the night', Alan Gillis
18. The Senate and the Stage, Adam Hanna
19. 'Cast a cold eye': Death in Wartime, Adam Piette
Part 3. From the Global to the Interplanetary
20. Tagore, Pound and World English, Justin Quinn
21. Africa, Nathan Suhr-Sytsma
22. Asias, Jahan Ramazani
23. 'The Scientific Revolution', Katherine Ebury
24. Planets, Cóilín Parsons
25. Visionary Poetics, Neil Mann
Part 4. Genres and Medias
26. Romanticism and Aestheticism, Charles Armstrong
27. Rites and Rhymes, Claire Nally
28. The most characteristic poet of modern Europe': Modernist Accommodations, Tom Walker
29. Illustrating, Jack Quin
30. Family Business at Dun Emer and Cuala: Collaboration, Contention, and Creativity, Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
31. In the Media, Emilie Morin
Part 5. Playing Yeats
32. Yeats's Early Plays: Gender, Genre, and Queer Collaboration, Susan Cannon Harris
33. 'A Country Over Wave': Japan, Noh, Kiogen, Akiko Manabe
34. Reading the Late Plays: Sexual Unorthodoxies, Zsuzsanna Balázs
35. Playing in Ireland, Patrick Lonergan
36. Dance, Susan Jones
Part 6. Reading Yeats
37. Imperfect Forms, Stephanie Burt
38. Visionary Comedy, Matthew Campbell
39. Masculinities, Lucy McDiarmid
40. Late Style: Art v. Life, Wayne K. Chapman
41. Editing, Warwick Gould
Postscript
42. Yeats and Contemporary Poetry: Twelve Speculative Takes, Vona Groarke