The development of digital technology and its widespread availability on the personal computer are bringing about a fundamental paradigm shift in the ways that literary texts are created, preserved, disseminated, and studied--a revolution that many scholars have argued is as profound as that created by Gutenberg's invention of movable type. At the same time, a major shift in textual theory--away from the notion of a "Definitive Edition" and toward a recognition of the integrity of discrete versions--has highlighted the fundamental limitations of the printed book.
The Literary Text in...

The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats includes all of the poems authorized by Yeats for inclusion in his standard canon. Breathtaking in range, it encompasses the entire arc of his career, from luminous reworkings of ancient Irish myths and legends to passionate meditations on the demands and rewards of youth and old age, from exquisite, occasionally whimsical songs of love, nature, and art to somber and angry poems of life in a nation torn by war and uprising. In observing the development of rich and recurring images and themes over the course of his body of work, we can trace the quest...

Throughout his long life, William Butler Yeats -- Irish writer and premier lyric poet in English in this century -- produced important works in every literary genre, works of astonishing range, energy, erudition, beauty, and skill. His early poetry is memorable and moving. His poems and plays of middle age address the human condition with language that has entered our vocabulary for cataclysmic personal and world events. The writings of his final years offer wisdom, courage, humor, and sheer technical virtuosity. T. S. Eliot pronounced Yeats "the greatest poet of our time -- certainly the...

The first edition of W. B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller.
Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard...

This study is a companion to the revised edition of W.B.Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition. Professor Finneran outlines the complex problems facing an editor of Yeats's poetry and explains the solutions adopted in the new text. Manuscript materials are drawn on extensively, including some which have recently come to light in the Scribner Archives at the University of Texas and at Princeton University. Compared with the first edition of this volume (Editing Yeats's Poems, 1983), there is an additional chapter - on the order of the poems - as well as new information on the Scribner Edition and...

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars Richard J. Finneran and George Mills Harper. This complete edition includes virtually all of the Nobel laureate's published work, in authoritative texts and with extensive explanatory notes.

Edited by the distinguished Yeats scholars Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran, The Irish Dramatic Movement gathers together -- for the first time -- all of the poet's time-honored essays on drama and the...