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7 books match the query 'Yeats'

cover of East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison

East-West Literary Imagination

Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison

Yoshinobu Hakutani

University of Missouri Press, 2017

This study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac.

Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.

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cover of Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance

Movement and Modernism

Yeats, Eliot, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance

Terri A. Mester

University of Arkansas Press, 1997

In this critical study, Terri Mester makes solid biographic, thematic, technical, and figurative cases that W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams turned to dance and dancers—actual and mythic—to reinvigorate their literary practices.
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cover of Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein

Poetry in the Museums of Modernism

Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein

Catherine Paul

University of Michigan Press, 2002

This book explores the relationships between four modernist poets and the museums that helped shape their writing. During the early twentieth century, museums were trying to reach a wider audience and used displayed objects to teach that audience about art, culture, and ecology. Writers such as Yeats, Pound, Moore, and Stein borrowed strategies and techniques from museums in order to create literary modernism. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism places these writers' poetry and prose within the context of specific gallery spaces, curatorial practices, displayed objects, and exhibition objectives of the museums that inspired them, exposing the ways in which literary modernism is linked to museums.
Although critics have attested to the importance of the visual arts to literary modernists and have begun to explore the relationships between literary production and social institutions, before now no one has examined the particular institutions in which modernist poets found the artworks, specimens, and other artifacts that inspired their literary innovations. Catherine Paul's book offers the reader a fresh encounter with modernism that will interest literary and art historians, literary theorists, critics, and scholars in cultural studies and museum studies.
Catherine Paul is Associate Professor of English, Clemson University.
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cover of The Geometry of Modernism: The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats

The Geometry of Modernism

The Vorticist Idiom in Lewis, Pound, H.D., and Yeats

By Miranda B. Hickman

University of Texas Press, 2006

Addressing both the literature and the visual arts of Anglo-American modernism, The Geometry of Modernism recovers a crucial development of modernism's early years that until now has received little sustained critical attention: the distinctive idiom composed of geometric forms and metaphors generated within the early modernist movement of Vorticism, formed in London in 1914. Focusing on the work of Wyndham Lewis, leader of the Vorticist movement, as well as Ezra Pound, H.D., and William Butler Yeats, Hickman examines the complex of motives out of which Lewis initially forged the geometric lexicon of Vorticism—and then how Pound, H.D., and Yeats later responded to it and the values that it encoded, enlisting both the geometric vocabulary and its attendant assumptions and ideals, in transmuted form, in their later modernist work.

Placing the genesis and appropriation of the geometric idiom in historical context, Hickman explores how despite its brevity as a movement, Vorticism in fact exerted considerable impact on modernist work of the years between the wars, in that its geometric idiom enabled modernist writers to articulate their responses to both personal and political crises of the 1930s and 1940s. Informed by extensive archival research as well as treatment of several of the least-known texts of the modernist milieu, The Geometry of Modernism clarifies and enriches the legacy of this vital period.

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cover of Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Theatre of the Real

Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim

Gina Masucci MacKenzie

The Ohio State University Press, 2008

The Theatre of the Real: Yeats, Beckett, and Sondheim traces the thread of jouissance (the simultaneous experience of radical pleasure and pain) through three major theatre figures of the twentieth century. Gina Masucci MacKenzie’s work engages theatrical text and performance in dialogue with the Lacanian Real, so as to re-envision modern theatre as the cultural site where author, actor, and audience come into direct contact with personal and collective traumas. By showing how a transgressively free subject may be formed through theatrical experience, MacKenzie concludes that modern theatre can liberate the individual from the socially constructed self.
 
The Theatre of the Real revises views of modern theatre by demonstrating how it can lead to a collaborative effort required for innovative theatrical work. By foregrounding Yeats’s “dancer” plays, the author shows how these intimate pieces contribute to the historical development of musical as well as modern theatre. Beckett’s universal dramas then pave the way for Sondheim’s postmodern cacophonies of idea and spirit as they introduce comic abjection into modernism’s tragic mode. This exciting work from a new author will leave readers with fresh insight to theatrical performance and its necessity in our lives.
 
 
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cover of Yeats and the Logic of Formalism

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism

Vereen M. Bell

University of Missouri Press, 2006

Yeats and the Logic of Formalism deals with formalism as a philosophy in Yeats’s works and how that in turn affects both his art and his social vision. Vereen M. Bell’s linking of “formalism” and “philosophy” stems from a meditation by Yeats in a manuscript note: “I am always feeling a lack of life's own values behind my
thought. They should have been there before the stream began, before it became necessary to let the work create its values.” In Bell’s reading, formalism is not simply a philosophy of art but a philosophy of life as directed by art—existential at its source and unpredictably political in its applications.
            Bell examines formalism as an ideology and evaluates its credibility in Yeats's practice in relation to other theoretical discourses and in the context of the turbulent cultural and historical circumstances under which Yeats worked. He invokes and elaborates upon Edward Said’s reading of Yeats as a special kind of colonial subject. He revisits in this context the issue of how much Yeats and Nietzsche have in common and argues, in the manner of J. Hillis Miller, that the primordial is for Yeats what formalism ultimately sets itself against.
            Yeats and the Logic of Formalism mediates between older, traditional readings and recent materialist critiques of Yeats’s work in an effort to restore a balanced perspective. The author centers most of his discussion on Yeats's poems as acts of thought, both as poetry and as a body of ideas. Within this context he
maintains that Yeats as a modernist is essentially aligned with Wallace Stevens in the project of creating supreme fictions. Formalism in this function, he argues, is an ideology without  content. As such, it compelled Yeats to remain unsettled in his outlook. On the other hand, it enabled him, as Richard Ellmann has pointed out, to continually adapt and readapt "himself to the changing conditions of his body and mind and of the outside world."
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cover of Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Volume XII, 1994

Yeats

An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies, Volume XII, 1994

Richard J. Finneran, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 1996

This latest volume of Yeats continues the tradition of excellence with nine new critical essays and a host of book reviews. Highlights include "Yeats at Fifty," a recent essay by A. Walton Litz; a consideration of the art in the Cuala Press Broadsides by Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux; and a discussion of the textual and interpretive history of The Green Helmet and Other Poems by David Holdeman. Other contributors include Brian Arkins on style in Yeats's poetry, David Clark on "Her Vision in a Wood," Peter Denman on Ferguson and Yeats, Shelley Sharp on Yeats's theater, and Janis E. Tedesco on the sexual dynamic of A Vision. Rounding out the volume are the annual bibliography of Yeats's scholarship by K. P. S. Jochum and a compilation of dissertation abstracts.
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