Yeats and Afterwords

Edited By Marjorie Howes And Joseph Valente

Description

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.

Sujets

• Comparative Literature
• Idioma inglés
• Idioma galés
• Irish
• English
• Poetry
• European
• Welsh
• Scottish
• Musique irlandaise
• William Butler Yeats
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9780268081768
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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E D I T E D B Y M A R J O R I E H O W E S A N D J O S E P H V A L E N T E

YEATS AND AFTERWORDS

YEATS AND AFTERWORDS

Edited by

MARJORIE HOWESandJOSEPH VALENTE

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2014 by the University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data

Yeats and afterwords / edited by Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 9780268011208 (paperback) — ISBN 0268011206 (paper) — ISBN 9780268081768 (ebook) 1. Yeats, W. B. ( William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and interpretation. I. Howes, Marjorie Elizabeth, editor. II. Valente, Joseph, editor. PR5907.Y37 2014 821'.8—dc23 2014022371

∞The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

vii

PART I . The Last Romant i cs

1 The Revivalist Museum: Yeats and the Reanimation of History 15 Renée Fox

2 The Death of Cuchulain’s Only Son Elizabeth Cullingford

42

3 The Dark Arts of the Critic: Yeats and William Carleton James H. Murphy

4 Nation for Art’s Sake: Aestheticist Afterwords in Yeats’s Irish Revival 100 Joseph Valente

Par t I I . Yeat s and Af t er wor ds

80

5 “The Age-Long Memoried Self ”: Yeats and the Promise of Coming Times 127 Gregory Castle

12 “All that Consequence”: Yeats and Eliot at the End of the End of History Jed Esty

Index of Names

List of Contributors

8 Yeats’s Graves: Death and Encryption inLast Poems Marjorie Howes

7 “The clock has run down and must be wound up again”: A Vision189in Time Margaret Mills Harper

213

10 Yeats and Bowen: Posthumous Poetics Vicki Mahaffey

11 The Legacy of Yeats in Contemporary Irish Poetry Ronald Schuchard

283

314

6 Afterwardsness: Yeats in Love and the Imaginary of Community Guinn Batten

9 “Echo’s Bones”: Samuel Beckett After Yeats Seán Kennedy

235

254

163

vi Contents

337

Par t I I I . Yeat s’s Af t er t i mes

342

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

We would like to thank the two anonymous readers for their insight- ful comments, and Stephen Little of the University of Notre Dame Press for his guidance, professionalism, and patience. We are grate- ful to theIrish University Reviewfor permission to reprint Ronald Schuchard’s essay, originally published inIrish University Review34:2 (2004): 291–314.

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YEATS AND AFTERWORDS