Progress & Identity in the Plays of W.B. Yeats, 1892-1907

by Suess; *

• ISBN13: 9780415966542
• ISBN10: 041596654X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-07-03
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Progress and Identity in the Poems of W. B. Yeatsexplores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites: Always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the Other. This system, which eventually became Yeats's doctrine of the mask, provided his contemporaries with a method of changing what science, Platonism, and Victorian bourgeois ideologies claimed to be inescapable qualities of self.Progress and Identityn relocates Yeats's literary, social, and political relevance from his essentializing cultural nationalism to his later, more broad-minded definitions of progress.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS	xi
ABBREVIATIONS	xiii
INTRODUCTION	xv
CHAPTER ONE "[F]ull of personified averages": Progress in the Victorian and Edwardian Eras	3	(26)
CHAPTER TWO Literatures of Progress	29	(28)
CHAPTER THREE Progress as Material Gain: The Bourgeois Peasant as Invented Tradition in The Countess Cathleen, Cathleen ni Houlihan, and The Land of Heart's Desire	57	(34)
CHAPTER FOUR Recovering the Feminized Other: Psychological Androgyny in The Kings Threshold, On Baile's Strana and Deirdre	91	(38)
CHAPTER FIVE "[N]ice little playwrights, making pretty little plays": Yeats, Irish Identity, and the Critical Response	129	(28)
NOTES	157	(16)
BIBLIOGRAPHY	173	(14)
INDEX	187