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  • Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    Irish Literature in Transition, 1880–1940
    Published online:
    28 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    A number of political transitions – imagined, real, hoped for and feared – were central to the Irish literary production of this period. In 1880 Ireland was part of a British Empire busy expanding into new territories, with some Irish people participating enthusiastically in that expansion and others waging various struggles against British rule. By 1940 part of the island was (in most senses) an independent state, Northern Ireland was set on the path that would take it to the Troubles of the late 1960s and beyond, and the British Empire’s demise was on the horizon.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1880–1940
  • Volume 4
  • Edited by Marjorie Elizabeth Howes
  • Published online:
    28 February 2020
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020
  • The years between 1880 and 1940 were a time of unprecedented literary production and political upheaval in Ireland. It is the era of the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish Revival, and a time when many major Irish writers - Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Lady Gregory - profoundly impacted Irish and World Literature. Recent research has uncovered new archives of previously neglected texts and authors. Organized according to multiple categories, ranging from single author to genre and theme, this volume allows readers to imagine multiple ways of re-mapping this crucial period. The book incorporates different, even competing, approaches and interpretations to reflect emerging trends and current debates in contemporary scholarship. As ongoing research in the field of Irish studies discovers new materials and critical strategies for interpreting them, our sense of Irish literary history during this period is constantly shifting. This volume seeks to capture the richness and complexity of the years 1880-1940 for our current moment.

Yeats's Nations
  • Gender, Class, and Irishness
  • Marjorie Howes
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    12 December 1996
  • Yeats, it has been claimed, invented a country and called it Ireland. In his plays, poetry and prose, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat and the rural Gaelic peasant combine to form a new community founded on custom and ceremony. Marjorie Howes's 1996 study attempts to examine Yeats's continuous search for political origins and cultural traditions through theoretical work on literature, gender and nationalism in post-colonial cultures. She explores the complex, often contradictory, ways Yeats's politics are refracted through his writing and shows how his enthusiastic advocacy of the concept of nationality often clashed with his distaste for the dominant, often exclusive, forms of Irish identity surrounding him. For every public proclamation on national destiny, there is an intensely private scrutiny of his own sexual identity. Howes places Yeats at the centre of debates on nationalism and gender that currently occupy critics in post-colonial studies. Her study will be of interest to all interested in Irish studies, postcolonial theory, and the relationship between nationalism and sexuality.

The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats
  • Edited by Marjorie Howes, John Kelly
  • Published online:
    28 January 2007
    Print publication:
    25 May 2006
  • This accessible and thought-provoking Companion is designed to help students experience the pleasures and challenges offered by one of the twentieth century's greatest poets. A team of international contributors examine Yeats's poetry, drama and prose in their historical and national contexts. The essays explain and synthesise major aspects and themes of his life and work: his lifelong engagement with Ireland, his complicated relationship to the English literary tradition, his literary, social, and political criticism and the evolution of his complex spiritual and religious sense. First-time readers of Yeats as well as more advanced scholars will welcome this comprehensive account of Yeats's career with its useful chronological outline and survey of the most important trends in Yeats scholarship. Taken as a whole, this Companion comprises an essential introduction for students and teachers of Yeats.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Marjorie Howes, Boston College, Massachusetts, John Kelly, St John's College, Oxford
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to W. B. Yeats
    Published online:
    28 January 2007
    Print publication:
    25 May 2006, pp 1-18

  • Summary

    Few modern writers have had careers as long, varied, and complex as W. B. Yeats. Born in 1865, he produced works that arguably belong to each of three major literary historical periods or traditions: the Romantic, the Victorian, and the Modernist. His thought was profoundly dialectical; for nearly every truth he made or found, he also embraced a counter-truth: a proposition that contradicted the first truth, was equally true, and did not negate it. He repeatedly remade himself as a writer, as a public figure, even as a person. And yet his life and work revolved around a few central preoccupations and themes: the Ireland of his day, the occult, sexual love, and the power of art to work in and change the world. In 1938, the year before he died, he wrote “The Spur” whose speaker accuses the reader of thinking it “horrible” that an old man should be filled with “lust and rage” and retorts “They were not such a plague when I was young. / What else have I to spur me into song?” (VP591). The continuity Yeats asserts here is both genuine and false. If we turn from this poem to the early poetry expecting to see the young Yeats lusting and raging, we will be disappointed. The explicit embrace of lust and rage is a feature of Yeats's later years, when he cast himself as the wild, wicked old man to avoid settling into any of the more comfortable poses available to him: the venerable sage, the elder statesman, or the famous poet. All these roles appealed to him, and he adopted each of them at times, but he also drove himself beyond them, towards more risky personae. As he put it in “An Acre of Grass,” “My temptation is quiet. / . . . Myself must I remake” (VP 575-6).

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