Description
Book SynopsisA study of Yeats's aesthetics, in which the writing is profoundly engaged with the inner world of Yeats's poetry. The author's familiarity with the internal stresses of Yeats's vision is grounded in serious and painstaking work in philosophy and literary theory from Kant to Kristeva. The significance and human importance of Yeats's poetry and thought are linked to contemporary issues of morality, politics and sexuality.
Trade Review"A work of adventurous scholarship not for the fainthearted. UCD Press produces an elegant volume worthy of its subject..." Books Ireland May 2000 "Engaging and thoroughly original, this study provides compelling analysis of Yeats's poetry as situated between Edmund Burke's empirical and Immanuel Kant's formal aesthetics." Dr Sarah Fulford Studies 89: 355, 2000 "This book is likely to remain the standard work for many years to come." Selina Guiness Irish Times August 2000 "a compelling argument which aims at, and achieves, an intimate ... understanding of Yeats's poetic quest." Emilie Pine, Trinity College Irish Literary Supplement Spring 2002 "makes an important contribution to Yeats criticism ... the argument is made throughout with clarity and style." The Year's Work in English Studies 2002 "Though not an easy read, this book rewards the effort. In its emphasis on the poems themselves, it is also refreshingly different from much of the good recent work on Yeats, which has been feminist or cultural-materialist." CHOICE March 2001
Table of ContentsPart 1 Prolegomena to a Yeatsian metaphysic: mercury sublimate - gender, revolution and the Burkean sublime; the smell of the fire - Kant, aesthetics, morality and culture - night or joy; Yeats, the negative and positive sublime. Part 2 Ascending breathless starlit air - the beautiful and the positive sublime: eternal beauty - early transcendental aesthetics; the labour to be beautiful - constructing an aesthetic; living beauty - aesthetic accommodation of history and society; the language of illusion; "A Vision" and the transcentental. Part 3 A dancer wound in his own entrails - the negative sublime: the frivolous eye - Yeatsian epiphany and the violence of God; desire and the fascist dream - destructive/creative violence in society; heart's victim and its torturer - wounds of the subject-object mystery. Part 4 Whence did all that fury come?: starlit air - the positive sublime; the stream that's roaring by - the tragedy of history; moving upon silence - alternating visions of sublimity.
