Yeats and Afterwords

<p>In <i>Yeats and Afterwords</i> contributors articulate W. B. Yeats's powerful multilayered sense of belatedness as part of his complex literary method. They explore how Yeats deliberately positioned himself at various historical endpoints-of Romanticism of the Irish colonial experience of the Ascendancy of civilization itself-and in doing so created a distinctively modernist poetics of iteration capable of registering the experience of finality and loss. While the crafting of such a poetics remained a constant throughout Yeats's career the particular shape it took varied over time depending on which lost object Yeats was contemplating. By tracking these vicissitudes the volume offers new ways of thinking about the overarching trajectory of Yeats's poetic engagements.</p> <p><i>Yeats and Afterwords</i> proceeds in three stages involving past-pastness present-pastness and future-pastness. The first The Last Romantics examines how Yeats repeats classic motifs and verbal formulations from his literary forebears in order to express the circumscribed cultural options with which he struggles. The essays in this section often uncover Yeats's relation to sources and precursors that are surprising or have been relatively neglected by scholars. The second section Yeats and Afterwords looks at how Yeats subjects his own past sentiments insights and styles to critical negation crafting his own afterwords in various ways. The last section Yeats's Aftertimes explores how thanks to the stature Yeats achieved through its invention his style of belatedness itself comes to be reiterated by other writers. Yeats is a towering figure in literary history hard to follow and harder to avoid and later writers often found themselves producing words that were in some sense his afterwords.</p> <p>This ground-breaking collection of essays examines Yeats's sense of historical belatedness as theme as trope in formal embodiments such as the afterword and in his strong critical shaping of literary history. In doing so it historicizes Yeats's own sense of history with unparalleled depth while seriously acting on the acceptance that form is itself historical. In showing how Yeats's moulding of the past was also the creation of a future it offers a range of productive new starting-points for the study of this great poet. -Edward Larrissy emeritus Queen's University Belfast</p> <p>Although <i>Yeats and Afterwords</i> focuses broadly on questions of inheritance and legacy it marks a new departure because it re-conceptualizes belatedness in a more complex and more theoretically useful manner than prior studies. What impressed me most about the collection is that the theoretical paradigms introduced at the outset are at once defining and fluid. The editors conceptualize belatedness in such a way that this insight gives structure to the volume even as it allows for a multiplicity of readings. This volume will have a major impact on Yeats studies and will be useful for scholars working more broadly in Irish and modernist studies. -Rob Doggett SUNY Geneseo</p>