Progress and Identity in the Poems of W. B. Yeats explores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites: Always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the Other. This system, which eventually became Yeats's doctrine of the mask, provided his contemporaries with a method of changing what science, Platonism, and Victorian bourgeois ideologies claimed to be inescapable qualities of self. Progress and Identityn relocates Yeats's literary, social, and political relevance from his essentializing cultural nationalism to his later, more broad-minded definitions of progress.

Exploration of Irish theatrical performance in England

The most recent volume of this distinguished annual

This monograph is based on archival research and close readings of James Joyce's and W. B. Yeats's poetics and political aesthetics. Georges Sorel's theory of social myth is used as a starting point for exploring the ways in which the experience of art can be seen as a form of religious experience.

The hill of Uisneach lies almost exactly at the geographical center of Ireland. Remarkably, a fraction at least of the ancient Irish population was aware of that fact. There is no doubt that the place of Uisneach in Irish mythology, and more broadly speaking the Celtic world, was of utmost importance: Uisneach was – and probably still is – best defined as a sacred hill at the center of Ireland, possibly the sacred hill of the center of Ireland. Uisneach or the Center of Ireland explores the medieval documents connected with the hill and compares them with both archeological data and modern Irish folklore. In the early 21st century, a Fire Festival started being held on Uisneach in connection with the festival of Bealtaine, in early May, arguably in an attempt to echo more ancient traditions: the celebration was attended by Michael D. Higgins, the current president of Ireland, who lit the fire of Uisneach on 6 May 2017. This book argues that the symbolic significance of the hill has echoed the evolution of Irish society through time, be it in political, spiritual and religious terms or, perhaps more accurately, in terms of identity and Irishness. It is relevant for scholars and advanced students in the fields of cultural history, Irish history and cultural studies.

This new essay collection brings together some of the top Brontë scholars working today, as well as new critical voices, to examine the many layers of Anne Brontë's fiction and other writings and to restore Brontë to her rightful place in literary history. Until very recently, Brontë's literary fate has been to live in the critical shadow of her older sisters, Charlotte and Emily, in spite of the fact that her two published novels, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were widely read and discussed during her lifetime. From a variety of fields-including psychology, religion, social criticism and literary tradition-the contributors to New Approaches to the Literary Art of Anne Brontë re-assess her works as those of an artist, which demand the rigorous scholarship and attention that they receive here.

This book scrutinizes the way modern Irish writers exploited or surrendered to primitivism, and how primitivism functions as an idealized nostalgia for the past as a potential representation of difference and connection.

Paul E H Davis and the Irish Land Question In his challenging new book, Paul E H Davis offers an entirely new critique of how novelists in nineteenth-century Ireland had to act -both as writers and historians - in their attempts to find a solution to what became the Irish Land Question. Callenging the widely-held nationalist view that Irish novelists of this period had little or nothing to offer, Davis slots these castaway novelists into a new, identifiable category: the agrarian novelists. The book is divided into three parts. Part One considers novelists writing between the Union and the Famine: Maria Edgeworth, Gerald Griffin, John and Michael Banim and William Carleton. Part Two looks at how the agrarian novel 'emigrates' with reference to the novels of Charles Kickham and to the Irish novels of Anthony Trollope. Part Three considers how some agrarian novelists - specifically Thomas Moore and Bram Stoker - felt the solution lay not in the real world but in the world of fantasy. An exceptional book on why the agrarian novelists deserve to be valued for their unique perception of Ireland in the nineteenth century.

This collection explores multiple artefactual, visual, textual and conceptual adaptations, developments and exchanges across the medieval world in the context of their contemporary and subsequent re-appropriations.

In Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence, Kristin Mahoney argues that the early twentieth century was a period in which the specters of the fin de siècle exercised a remarkable draw on the modern cultural imagination and troubled emergent avant-gardistes. These authors and artists refused to assimilate to the aesthetic and political ethos of the era, representing themselves instead as time travellers from the previous century for whom twentieth-century modernity was both baffling and disappointing. However, they did not turn entirely from the modern moment, but rather relied on decadent strategies to participate in conversations concerning the most highly vexed issues of the period including war, the rise of the Labour Party, the question of women's sexual freedom, and changing conceptions of sexual and gender identities.