W.B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology The Politics of Pastoral, Nationhood and Modernity

ISBN-13: 9783639100037 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 252 str.

Rached Khalifa

Opis

W. B. Yeats: A Poetics of Ideology investigates the articulations of ideology in Yeats from the beginning of his poetic career. The book seeks to contextualize this ideology within what I call "the modernist predicament." Yeatss articulation of politics can be divided into three major phases. The first focuses on his juvenilia, where politics is articulated in the pastoral trope at the unconscious level of the text. The second is explicitly expressed in Yeatss "imaginative nationalism." Here Ireland is painted as a utopian land, an extension of his early pastoral world. In such an idyllic depiction of the nation traumatic events like the Great Hunger are glossed over. The third phase grounds Yeats in the modernist predicament. Here the poets consciousness of the discrepancy between aesthetics and praxis, poetry and modernity, is paramount to our understanding of the Yeatsian crisis. The crisis articulates itself in Yeatss politicization of space and claustrophilia. The book aims to trace the development or, better still, radicalization of Yeatss political thought, especially with regard to modernity and the Enlightenment.

O autorze

Rached Khalifa is a Reader in English and Irish Literature at
the High Institute of Human Sciences of Tunis. He completed a
PhD at the University of Essex, England. He taught in the
Department of Literature at Essex in 2003. He published a book
on Yeats, The Filthy Modern Tide, in 2006, and numerous articles
in books and journals.