Focusing on W.B. Yeats's ideal of mutual support between the arts and on the cultural production of the Yeats circle members, Karen Brown explores the artistic relationships and outcome of Yeats's vision in five case studies. In so doing, the author makes use of primary materials and fresh archival evidence, and delves into a variety of media, including embroidery, print, illustration, theatre, costume design, poetry, and painting.
Focusing on W.B. Yeats's ideal of mutual support between the arts, Karen Brown sheds new light on how collaborations and differences between members of the Yeats family circle contributed to the metamorphosis of the Irish Cultural Revival into Irish Modernism. Making use of primary materials and fresh archival evidence, Brown delves into a variety of media including embroidery, print, illustration, theatre, costume design, poetry, and painting. Tracing the artistic relationships and outcome of W.B. Yeats's vision through five case studies, Brown explores the poet's early engagement with artistic tradition, contributions to the Dun Emer and Cuala Industries, collaboration between W.B. Yeats and Norah McGuinness, analysis of Thomas MacGreevy's pictorial poetry, and a study of literary influence and debt between Jack Yeats and Samuel Beckett. Having undertaken extensive archival research relating to word and image studies, Brown considers her findings in historical context, with particular emphasis on questions of art and gender and art and national identity. Interdisciplinary, this volume is one of the first full-length studies of the fraternit?es arts surrounding W.B. Yeats. It represents an important contribution to word and image studies and to debates surrounding Irish Cultural Revival and the formation of Irish Modernism.
This book comprehensively examines the relationship between literature and sculpture in the work of W. B. Yeats, drawing on extensive archival research to offer revelatory new readings of the poet. The book traces Yeats's literary and critical engagement with Celtic Revival statuary, public monuments in Dublin, the coin designs of the Irish Free State, abstract sculpture by the Vorticists and modernists, and a variety of carvings, decorative sculptures, and objets d'art. By charting Yeats's early art school education in Dublin, his attempts to raise funds for public monuments in the city, and to secure commissions for his favourite sculptors, the book documents a lifelong interest in the plastic arts. New and original readings of Yeats's poetry, drama, and prose criticism emerge from this concertedly inter-arts and interdisciplinary study.
Yeats’s Mask, Yeats Annual No. 19 is a special issue in this renowned research-level series. Fashionable in the age of Wilde, the Mask changes shape until it emerges as Mask in the system of A Vision. Chronologically tracing the concept through Yeats’s plays and those poems written as ‘texts for exposition’ of his occult thought which flowers in A Vision itself (1925 and 1937), the volume also spotlights ‘The Mask before The Mask’ numerous plays including Cathleen Ni-Houlihan, The King’s Threshold, Calvary, The Words upon the Window-pane, A Full Moon in March and The Death of Cuchulain. There are excurses into studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. His self-renewal after The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited from MSS by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, is republished from the elusive Yeats Annual No. 1 (1982). The essays are by David Bradshaw, Michael Cade-Stewart, Aisling Carlin, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Pierre Longuenesse, Jerusha McCormack, Neil Mann, Emilie Morin, Elizabeth Müller and Alexandra Poulain, with shorter notes by Philip Bishop and Colin Smythe considering Yeats’s quatrain upon remaking himself and the pirate editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire. Ten reviews focus on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS Series, his correspondence with George Yeats, and numerous critical studies. Yeats Annual is published by Open Book Publishers in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.
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.
This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age: the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskin’s immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
This collection provides a transnational, interdisciplinary perspective on artistic responses to war from 1914 to the present, analysing a broad selection of the rich, complex body of work which has emerged in response to conflicts since the Great War. Many of the creators examined here embody the human experience of war: first-hand witnesses who developed a unique visual language in direct response to their role as victim, soldier, refugee, resister, prisoner and embedded or official artist. Contributors address specific issues relating to propaganda, wartime femininity and masculinity, women as war artists, trauma, the role of art in soldiery, memory, art as resistance, identity and the memorialisation of war.
The virtual realities that works of literary and visual art provide us are loosely the concern of these essays. Working methods are touched upon in some, as in my interviews with William Anastasi and Robert Kipniss. The intentionality of the artist, however, is never my concern, nor should it be of interest to the reader; the intentions cannot necessarily be derived from the work (as the New Critics reminded us long ago). Rather, to see and feel how the text or work of visual functions is our pleasant task. So we do not ask why, a dead-end question. How is the question that can lead to infinitely more rewarding discoveries.
Ireland on Show analyses the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland-and in how Ireland was viewed beyond its own shores, in particular in Great Britain and the United States. This study moves beyond museums, to address the range of art institutions in Irish cities that displayed art, from the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in the 1820s, to Hugh Lane's Municipal Art Gallery, opened in Dublin in 1908. By highlighting the tension between unionist and nationalist viewpoints, Cullen uses the display of art to investigate the complexities of Irish cultural life before the founding of the Free State.
