How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.
Dans ce recueil convergent différents regards sur la poésie de W.B. Yeats. Ces pages le situent par rapport à d’autres poètes comme MacNeice. Elles nous promènent aussi des premiers volumes, où l’espace de l’écriture devient l’écriture de l’espace, à Responsabilities, volume qui témoigne d’une intensité qu’Ezra Pound qualifie de « robustesse nouvelle », puis à travers les thèmes sexuels, politiques et esthétiques de Michael Robartes and the Dancer. Nous abordons ensuite les grands poèmes de la maturité avec The Tower. Cet ouvrage envisage également des sujets généraux, comme l’importance de la tradition pour Yeats, sa conception de l’au-delà avec la dette envers l’Inde en particulier, son attitude face à la dégénérescence, sa vision de l’Apocalypse avec le symbole de la spirale. D’autres études se concentrent sur certains grands poèmes tels que « The Circus Animais Desertion », qui tisse ensemble et la vie et l’art, ou « Lapis Lazuli » et la notion de « joie tragique ».
In recent years Yeats scholarship has been, to a large extent, historically-based in emphasis. Much has been gained from this emphasis, if we consider the refinement of critical awareness resulting from a better understanding of the intricate relationship between the poet and his times. However, the present author feels that an exclusive adherence to this approach impacts negatively on our ability to appreciate and understand Yeatsian creativity from within the internally located imperatives of creativity itself, as opposed to our understanding it on the basis of aesthetically constitutive socio-historical forces operative from without. He feels a need to relocate the study of Yeats in the work and thought of the poet himself, to focus again on the poet’s own myth-making. To this end Nicholas Meihuizen examines this myth-making as it relates to certain archetypal figures, places, and structures. The figures in question are the antagonist and goddess, embodiments of conflict and feminine forces in Yeats, and they participate in a lively drama within the places and shapes considered sacred by the poet: places such as the Sligo district and Byzantium; shapes such as the circling gyres of his system. The book should be interesting and valuable to students and scholars of varying degrees of acquaintance with the poet. To long-time Yeatsians it offers fresh perspectives onto important works and preoccupations. To new students it offers a means of exploring wide-ranging material within a few central, interrelated frames, a means that mirrors Yeats’s own commitment to unity in diversity.
Arguing for a reconsideration of William Butler Yeats’s work in light of contemporary studies of world literature, Barry Sheils makes a strong case for reading Yeats’s work in the context of a broad comprehension of its global modernity. He shows how Yeats enables a fuller understanding of the relationship between the extensive map of world literary production and the intensities of poetic practice.
'But I, being poor, have only my dreams; / I have spread my dreams under your feet...' By turns joyful and despairing, some of the twentieth century's greatest verse on fleeting youth, fervent hopes and futile sacrifice.
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
This book explores the question of Yeats’s identity as an important issue in the criticism of the Irish poet. The identity of the poet with the advent of postcolonial theory into Irish studies in general and Yeats’s studies in particular, this controversial issue has gained new dimensions. Whether Yeats was a revolutionary and anti-colonial nationalist or a poet with unionist and colonialist inclinations has been the subject of much debate and less agreement. One can justify any of these versions of Yeats by concentrating on some of his works and utterances and ignoring some others. However, this will result in an incomplete and partial picture of a complex, multidimensional, and ever-changing poet such as Yeats. It explores the different aspects of W. B. Yeats’s poetic theory and political ideology. It also studies Yeats’s modernity and influences on his contemporaries as well as successors, such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Aden. Though three common themes in Yeats’ poetry are love, Irish nationalism and mysticism, modernism is the overriding theme in his writings. Yeats started his long literary career as a romantic poet and gradually evolved into a modernist poet. As a typical modern poet, he regrets the post-war modern world, which is now in disorder and chaotic tuition and laments the past.
Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult collects seven new essays on aspects of Yeats's thought and reading, from ancient and modern philosophy and cosmological doctrines, mysticism and esoteric thought.
The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.
