Table of contents

Table of contents

This set reissues 6 books, originally published between 1951 and 1990, on William Butler Yeats, a foremost figure of twentieth-century literature and one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival. The volumes examine Yeats’s work, his poetic development, and his social and private life, and will be of interest to students of literature.

Carrying a story to tell is the “ancient burden” of craftsmen, and it is one of the characteristics of the quest to find oneself, since a journey requires recognition of the aspects of self and anti–self. Like the speaker of his poems, W.B. Yeats has something to tell. His poetry draws nourishment from the battle between the dichotomies of self and anti–self, human and divine, mind and intellect, past and present, and body and soul. This book covers a selection of Yeats’s poems from 1889 to 1939, discussing them within the frame of the quest to find oneself and its gyroscopic transformation. The book illustrates that self is not a single entity, but has multiple layers, and it can be found within the quest in which it experiences a simultaneous transformation with every phase of the antithetical structure of gyroscopic movements. In addition, the way of the quest is cyclical; however, it is not a vicious cycle, since, in life, every end is a phase of a beginning and every beginning is a phase of an end.

An up-to-date account of one of the major poets in the English language of the past two centuries, this book not only introduces the reader to contemporary themes in Yeats criticism, but also provides a unified interpretation based on Yeats's ambivalent sense of identity as a nationalist conscious of the Anglo-Irish tradition from which he claimed

This student friendly book draws together text, context, criticism and performance history to provide an integrated view of one of the most dazzling works of the early modern theatre.

Whether read from beginning to end or used as a reference tool, this sourcebook reveals the varied life of 'David Copperfield' in the hands of generations of readers, critics and adaptors, and introduces the work in its social, biographical and literary contexts.