Description
Yeats, Revival, and the Temporalities of Irish Modernism offers a new understanding of a writer whose revivalist commitments are often regarded in terms of nostalgic yearning and dreamy romanticism. It counters such conventions by arguing that Yeats's revivalism is an inextricable part of his modernism. Gregory Castle provides a new reading of Yeats that is informed by the latest research on the Irish Revival and guided by the phenomenological idea of worldmaking, a way of looking at literature as an aesthetic space with its own temporal and spatial norms, its own atmosphere generated by language, narrative, and literary form. The dialectical relation between the various worlds created in the work of art generate new ways of accounting for time beyond the limits of historical thinking. It is just this worldmaking power that links Yeats's revivalism to his modernism and constructs new grounds for recognizing his life and work.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Time, Recognition, and the Worlds of Yeats's Work; 1. The Irish Revival and Yeats's Literary Nationalism; 2. 'A dream-heavy land': Other Worlds in Yeats's Early Poetry and Drama; 3. 'O when will it suffice?': Poetry and Responsibility; 4. 'The Age-Long Memoried Self': Vision and Aesthetic Bildung; 5. 'I make the truth': Cuchulain's Heroic Worlds; 6. 'They had changed their throats': Testament and Time; Conclusion: Yeats's 'A General Introduction for my Work'.
