Marjorie Howes' study is the first sustained attempt to examine Yeats' continuous search for political origins and cultural traditions through the most recent work in postcolonial theory. She explores the complex, often contradictory ways Yeats' politics are refracted through his writing. Yeats' enthusiastic advocacy of the concept of nationality clashed with his distaste for the dominant and exclusive forms of Irish identity surrounding him. Her study will be of interest to all interested in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, and the relationship between nationalism and sexuality.

Semicolonial Joyce is the first collection of essays to address the importance of Ireland's colonial situation in understanding the work of James Joyce. The volume reflects the ambivalences in Joyce's relationship with Irish nationalism, bringing together leading commentators on a topic that has attracted growing interest in recent years. The contributions both draw on and question the achievements of postcolonial theory, presenting a range of voices rather than a single position, and provide fresh insights into Joyce's resourceful engagement with political issues that remain highly topical...

This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense. First-time...

In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints--of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself--and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time,...

In Yeats and Afterwords, contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful, multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints—of Romanticism, of the Irish colonial experience, of the Ascendancy, of civilization itself—and, in doing so, created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career, the particular shape it took varied over time,...