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

by Barbara A. Suess

Overview

Progress and Identity in the Poems of W. B. Yeats explores 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415966542
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/03/2003
Series:	Studies in Major Literary Authors , #25
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction Chapter One: [F]ull of personified averages: Progress in the Victorian and Edwardian Era Chapter Two: Literatures of Progress 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 Chapter Four: Recovering the Feminized Other: Psychological Androgyny in The King's Threshold, On Baile's Strand, and Deirdre Chapter Five: [N]ice little playwrights, making pretty little plays: Yeats, Irish Identity, and the Critical Response Notes Bibliography Index