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In this, the first sustained feminist analysis of Yeats, Elizabeth Butler Cullingford resituates his love poems in their cultural and historical context. Yeats himself said that when he started to write verse, "no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry." Cullingford argues that the politics of sexuality are at the heart of his creative enterprise. From the early lyrics prompted by his frustrated love for Maud Gonne through later works such as "Leda and the Swan," "Among School Children," and the Crazy Jane sequence, she traces the complex intersections between history, aesthetics, and desire. Cullingford shows how women's demand for emancipation brought pressure to bear on the conventions of love poetry, which idealize woman as an aesthetic object; and how Yeats's revision of these formal conventions modifies his idea of the Irish nation, which has traditionally been represented as female. Yeats described himself as "a man of my time, through my poetical faculty living its history": his love poetry bears the impress of the shifting balance of sexual power and the struggle to define a postcolonial Irish identity.
This first full-length feminist treatment of Yeats shows how his experience of changes in the balance of power between men and women led him to expand the formal possibilities of love poetry. As a white, male, middle-class, Protestant citizen of the British Empire, with an acknowledged debt to canonical English writers, Yeats belonged to the dominant tradition. As a colonized Irishman, however, he was acutely conscious of repression and exclusion. This detailed examination of Yeats's work re-situates a private genre in a public context, relating the formal conventions of love poetry to the histories of the emancipation of women and the decolonization of Ireland. Yeats's complex position in history and culture, his long obsession with a "New Woman," his unstable gender identity, and his constant remaking of traditional lyric forms, combine to differentiate his love poetry from that of misogynist practitioners of the genre.
Table of contents
Modernism, as a powerful movement, saw the literary and artistic traditions, as well as pure science, starting to evolve radically, creating a crisis, even chaos, in culture and society. Within this chaos, myth offered an ordered picture of that world employing symbolic and poetic images. Both W.B. Yeats and Angelos Sikelianos embraced myth and symbols because they liberate imagination and raise human consciousness, bringing together humans and the cosmos. Being opposed to the rigidity of scientific materialism that inhibits spiritual development, the two poets were waiting for a new age and a new religion, expecting that they, themselves, would inspire their community and usher in the change. In their longing for a new age, archaeology was a magnetic field for Yeats and Sikelianos, as it was for many writers and thinkers. After Sir Arthur Evans’s discovery of the Minoan Civilization where women appeared so peacefully prominent, the dream of re-creating a gynocentric mythology was no longer a fantasy. In Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the feminine figure appears in various forms and, like in a drama, it plays different roles. Significantly, a gynocentric mythology permeates the work of the two poets and this mythology is of pivotal importance in their poetry, their poetics and even in their life as the intensity of their creative desire brought to them female personalities to inspire and guide them. Indeed, in Yeats’s and Sikelianos’s gynocentric mythology, the image of the feminine holds a place within a historical context taking the reader into a larger social, political and religious space.
Gender, Performance, and Authorship at the Abbey Theatre argues for a reconsideration of authorship at the Abbey Theatre. The actresses who performed the key roles at the Abbey contributed original ideas, language, stage directions, and revisions to the theatre's most renowned performances and texts, and this study asks that we consider the role of actresses in the development of these plays. Plays that have been historically attributed to W. B. Yeats and J. M. Synge have complicated histories, and the neglect of these women's contributions over the past century reflects power dynamics that privilege male, Anglo Irish writers over the contributions of working class actresses. The study asks that readers consider the importance of past performance in the creation of written text. Yeats began his earliest plays performing with and writing for Laura Armstrong, a young woman who was a precursor to Maud Gonne in her irreverent challenge to traditional gender roles. After writing his first plays and poems for Armstrong, Yeats met Gonne and developed two Cathleen plays, The Countess Cathleen and Cathleen ni Houlihan, for her to perform, beginning a lifetime of fruitful argument between the two writers about how Ireland should appear onstage. The book then turns to Synge's work with Molly Allgood in creating The Playboy of the Western World and Molly's contributions to Synge's Deirdre of the Sorrows. A section on Yeats's Deirdre shows the contributions of Lady Gregory and the play's performers. The book ends with a reconsideration of Abbey actress Sara Allgood's performances in British and American film as she brought her earliest work in the pre-Abbey tableau movement to American audiences in the 1940s, in ways that challenged ideas of Irishness, American identity, and aging women on screen.
A comprehensive and accessible introduction to the major themes of this important poet's life and career.
As publishers in private printing presses, as writers of dissident texts and as political campaigners against censorship and for intellectual freedom, a radical group of twentieth-century Irish women formed a female-only coterie to foster women’s writing and maintain a public space for professional writers. This book documents the activities of the Women Writers’ Club (1933–1958), exploring its ethos, social and political struggles, and the body of works created and celebrated by its members. Examining the period through a history of the book approach, it covers social events, reading committees, literary prizes, publishing histories, modernist printing presses, book fairs, reading practices, and the various political philosophies shared by members of the Club. It reveals how professional women writers deployed their networks and influence to carve out a space for their writing in the cultural marketplace, collaborating with other artistic groups to fight for creative freedoms and the right to earn a living by the pen. The book paints a vivid portrait of the Women Writers’ Club, showcasing their achievements and challenging existing orthodoxy on the role of women in Irish literary life.
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.
In the twentieth century more people spoke English and more people wrote poetry than in the whole of previous history, and this Companion strives to make sense of this crowded poetical era. The original contributions by leading international scholars and practising poets were written as the contributors adjusted to the idea that the possibilities of twentieth-century poetry were exhausted and finite. However, the volume also looks forward to the poetry and readings that the new century will bring. The Companion embraces the extraordinary development of poetry over the century in twenty English-speaking countries; a century which began with a bipolar transatlantic connection in modernism and ended with the decentred heterogeneity of post-colonialism. Representation of the 'canonical' and the 'marginal' is therefore balanced, including the full integration of women poets and feminist approaches and the in-depth treatment of post-colonial poets from various national traditions. Discussion of context, intertextualities and formal approaches illustrates the increasing self-consciousness and self-reflexivity of the period, whilst a 'Readings' section offers new readings of key selected texts. The volume as a whole offers critical and contextual coverage of the full range of English-language poetry in the last century.
Yeats and Women , published originally in the Yeats Annuals series, collects eight essays on Yeats's relationships with women, two collections of letters to him and his broadcast, 'Poems about Women'. The essays cover sexuality and its dynamic in Yeats's writing: his attitude to feminism and to the 'feminist occult'; his relationships with Maud Gonne, Dorothea Hunter, Olivia Shakespear, Florence Farr, Iseult Gonne and George Yeats. Yeats's relationship with Lady Gregory and her co-authorship of Cathleen ni Houlihan is analysed. The collection includes 12 plates.