The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts
Edited by Charles I. Armstrong, Adrian Paterson, Tom Walker
The first book to comprehensively address W.B. Yeats’s engagements across the arts as both writer and cultural worker
- Includes detailed case studies which capture the complex history of Yeats as an inter-arts thinker and collaborator
- Presents a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including from scholars of literature, aesthetics, drama, music, dance and the visual arts, as well as perspectives drawn from Victorian, Fin de siècle and Modernist studies
- Offers the latest critical thinking on the intersections between Yeats’s interest in the arts, his role as an active public figure and the socio-political and ideological nature of his writings
- Features new work exploring many arts in combination, as well as focused, fully illustrated analyses of individual arts to appeal to a wide variety of readers and practitioners
W. B. Yeats was not only a poet but also a cultural revolutionary. A compulsive, restless collaborator, he fostered numerous artistic enterprises, from the Abbey Theatre to the Cuala Press, and pursued a variety of inter-artistic spaces and media. From childhood co-creations with his siblings to the arresting combinations of sound and movement in his late drama, his work repeatedly addresses and incorporates music, dance, and the visual, material and theatrical arts with remarkable intensity. For him, literature was a vital thing that in one form or another engaged all the senses. This volume’s newly commissioned chapters analyse afresh such engagements. Bringing together scholars of literature, aesthetics and cultural history with specialists in drama, music, dance and the visual arts, they provide an exciting range of historical, conceptual and disciplinary perspectives.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction, Charles I. Armstrong, Adrian Paterson and Tom Walker
Part I: Contexts and Concepts
1. Yeats, William Morris and the Aesthetics of the Everyday, Lucy Hartley and John Whittier-Ferguson
2. Yeats and The Savoy: French Decadence and Irish Poetry, Matthew Creasy
3. The Institutionalisation of Art in Dublin: Yeats, Sociability and Transnationalism, Kathryn Milligan
4. The Virtual Archive of Anima Mundi, Charles I. Armstrong
5. On the Scale of Art and the Aesthetics of Difficulty: Re-reading ‘Lapis Lazuli’ as Ecological Critique, Barry Shiels
6. Knowing Ruskin’s Cat: Yeats and the Proper Names of the Aesthetic, Christopher Morash
7. Cuchulain the Cowboy: A Tale of Yeats and the Wild West, Margaret Mills Harper
Part II: Visual and Material Culture
8. Yeats, Blake and the Romanticism of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Colin Trodd
9. Yeats and Edwardian Languages of Art, Sophie Hatchwell
10. The Wild Swans at Coole (1917, 1919), Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) and the Limits of Portraiture, Tom Walker
11. A ‘cacophony of sardine tins’: Yeats and Modern Art, Hugh Haughton
12. Yeats, Byzantine Art and Celtic Occultism, J. B. Bullen
13. A Swedish Bounty: Yeats, Public Art and European Nationalisms in the Free State, Jack Quin
14. Preservation and Proportion in ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, Adam Hanna
15. Late Yeats, Print and Symbolic Book Design: The Case of Responsibilities, David Holdeman
16. Illustrating the 1935 and 1937 Cuala Press Broadsides, Angela Griffith
17. Poetry, Painting and Posterity: Yeats as Example and Burden, Rui Carvalho Homem
Part III: Performance and Sound
18. The World that Sang and Listened: Yeats and Florence Farr’s ‘New Art’ of Verse Speaking, Isabelle Stuart
19. ‘Music had driven their wits astray’: Raftery, Nietzsche and the Applied Arts, Adrian Paterson
20. Yeats and Wagner: The Countess Cathleen and Other Plays, Michael McAteer
21. ‘We must have a new kind of scenic art’: Yeats’s Set Design and Stagecraft, Seán Golden
22. Yeats, Gender-Bending and the Art of Transvestism, Zsuzsanna Balázs
23. The Dramaturgy of Movement: Choreographic Writing in The Dreaming of the Bones, Melinda Szűts
24. Choreographic Collaborations: Yeats and Ninette de Valois, Megan Girdwood
25. ‘Lose my words in patterns of sound’: Music in the Dance Plays for Ninette de Valois, Mark Fitzgerald
26. Yeats’s Common Measure: The Later Ballads, Matthew Campbell
Notes on Contributors
Index
The brilliance of this collection is that it treats the arts – music, dance, visual, material, theatrical, and literary – exactly as Yeats himself insisted they should be treated: as intimately and profoundly interrelated. The volume’s innovative multimedial approach is genuinely interdisciplinary and brings together important scholars from an impressively wide range of fields.
The volume offers a critical and valuable exploration of Yeats’s extraordinary work and career.
Summing Up: Highly recommended.
