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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances

Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances

Foster, R. F.

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 019964165X
ISBN13: 9780199641659
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: Feb 7 2013
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.10 Depth: 7.60
Language: English
R. F. Foster's two-volume biography of Yeats was hailed in the New York Review of Books as a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion. Now, Foster turns his focus to the largely unacknowledged influences that shaped the young W. B. Yeats.

So dramatic and revolutionary was Yeats' impact on Irish literature that the writers and traditions that preceded him are often overlooked, just as his successors are often overshadowed by his achievement. In Words Alone, Foster explores the Irish literary traditions that preceded Yeats, including romantic national tales in post-Union Ireland and Scotland, the nationalist poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural fictions of Sheridan LeFanu, the peasant fictions of William Carleton, and the fairy-lore and folktale collections Yeats absorbed. As well as placing these nineteenth-century literary movements in a rich contemporary context of politics, polemic, and social tension, Foster discusses recent critical and interpretive approaches to these phenomena. But the unifying theme throughout the book is the self-conscious use Yeats made of his literary predecessors during his own apprenticeship, particularly in the construction of his path-breaking early work.

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