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Hoffmann, Deborah. "The spirit of sound prosodic method in the poetry of William Blake, W.B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot." Thesis, McGill University, 2009. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=115657.
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Accompanying materials housed with archival copy.This project focuses on the prosody of three major poets, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. It explores the relationship between each poet's poetic sound structures and his spiritual aims. The project argues that in Blake's prophetic poems The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, in Yeats's middle and late poetry, and in Eliot's post-conversion poetry, the careful structuring of the non-semantic features of language serves to model a process through which one may arrive at the threshold of a spiritual reality.
The introductory chapter situates these poets' works within the genre of mystical writing; establishes the epistemological nature of poetic sound and its relationship to mystical expression; considers the historical and personal exigencies that influence each poet's prosodic choices; and outlines the prosodic method by which their poetry is scanned. Chapter one addresses William Blake's efforts to re-vision Milton's Christian epic Paradise Lost by means of a logaoedic prosody intended to move the reader from a rational to a spiritual perception of the self and the world. Chapter two considers the development of W.B. Yeats's contrapuntal prosody as integral to his attempt to make of himself a modern poet and to his antithetical mystical philosophy. Chapter three explores the liminal prosody of T. S. Eliot by which he creates an incantatory movement that points to a spiritual reality behind material reality. The project concludes with a consideration of the spiritual aims of Gerard Manley Hopkins and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and posits a revaluation of Hopkins' sprung rhythm and H.D.'s revisionary chain of sound as prosodic practices intrinsic to their spiritual aims.
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Grimes, Linda S. "William Butler Yeats' transformations of eastern religious concepts." Virtual Press, 1987. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/530371.
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This study addresses the issue of William Butler Yeats' use of Upanishad philosophy in his poetry. Although many analyses of Yeats' art vis-a-vis Eastern religion exist, none offer the thesis that the poet transformed certain religious concepts for his own purpose, thereby removing those concepts from the purview of Eastern religion. Quite the contrary, many of the analyses argue a parallel between Yeats' poetry and the religious concepts.In Chapter 1 this study gives a brief overview of the problem and proposes the thesis that instead of paralleling Eastern religious concepts, Yeats transformed those concepts; such transformations result in ideas which run counter to the yogic goal as expounded in the Upanishads.Chapter 2 summarizes yogic sources which help elucidate the concepts of Upanishad thought. Also Chapter 2 introduces various the critical analyses which present inaccurate conclusions regarding Yeats' use of Eastern religion.Chapter 3 explains certain Eastern religious concepts such concepts as karma and reincarnation and asserts that the goal of the discipline of yoga is self-realization.Chapter 4 discusses the poems of Yeats' canon which have been analyzed critically in terms of Eastern religious concepts and have erroneously been considered to parallel certain Eastern concepts. This chapter argues that Yeats' transformations resulted in an art which is chiefly based on the physical level of being, whereas the goal of yogic discipline places its chief emphasis on the spiritual level of being. Also it is argued that Yeats cultivated imagination, whereas the Eastern religious devotee cultivates intuition.Chapter 5 details the critical analyses which have erroneously argued the Yeatsian parallel to Eastern religion, showing how these critics have sometimes failed to understand concepts adequately and thus have misapplied them to Yeats' art.Chapter 6 contrasts Yeats' poetry with that of Rabindranath Tagore. Yeats failed to realize Tagore's motivation when Tagore referred to God. Yeats claimed that all reference to Cod was vague and that he disliked Tagore's mysticism. This lack of understanding on Yeats' part, I suggest, further supports the thesis that Yeats' use of Eastern religion constitutes transformations which do not reflect Upanishad philosophy but instead reflect a Yeatsian version of those concepts--a version which many critics have not clearly elucidated.Department of English
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Prosser, Christopher Skinner 1978. "Two Trees." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/11048.
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1 score (viii, 79 p.) A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.The Two Trees is a fifteen-minute musical composition for orchestra. Inspired by William Butler Yeats' poem of the same name, the piece depicts the images described by Yeats' poetic narrative through a double theme and variations form consisting of two contrasting themes that are related, one ascending and one descending. Each theme represents one of the two contrasting sections of the poem and is followed by a set of five variations for a total of ten. Since the rhyme scheme of each section of the poem is divided into five phrases of four lines, each musical variation corresponds to four lines of text.
Committee in Charge: David Crumb, Chair; Robert Kyr; Jack Boss
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Peter, Denise. "W.B. Yeats' Four Plays for Dancers : the search for unity." Thesis, McGill University, 1995. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=23732.
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This thesis proposes that Yeats found in certain conventions of the Noh drama a realization and defense of his idea of unity of culture, which his Noh-like Four Plays for Dancers illustrates. Yeats' use of recurrent imagery in the dance plays expresses his belief in a unity of culture defined and evoked by an image and stems in part from the pattern of images he discovered in the Pound-Fenollosa translations of the Noh. The imagery of the poetic text reappears in symbolic visual designs or is coordinated with music and dance in the production of the plays. The importance of the spoken word above all determined the basis of the association of arts with which Yeats characterized unity of culture and shaped his adaptation and occasional misconception of the staging techniques of the Noh. A common love of vivid, allusive words joined the audience for whom the dance plays were written. When Yeats stated that they were modelled on the audience of the Noh, his perception was colored, as usual, by his own priorities and experience.
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Brooks, John C. "Unity, Ecstasy, Communion: The Tragic Perspective of W.B. Yeats." Thesis, North Texas State University, 1988. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc331259/.
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As a young man of twenty-one in 1886, William Butler Yeats announced his ambition to unify Ireland through heroic poetry. But this prophetic urge lacked structure. Yeats had only some callow notions about needing self-possession and appropriate control of his imagery. As a result, his search for essential knowledge and experience soon led him into occult and symbolist vagueness. Yeats' mind grew flaccid, and his art languished in preciosity for over a decade. Lotos-eating had replaced prophetic fervor.
However, early in the new century, as Yeats neared middle age and permanent mediocrity, he recovered his early zeal and finally found the means to give it artistic shape. Through daily theatre work he had discovered tragedy. And through personal trials he had developed a tragic sense. Hence, an entire tragic perspective was born, one that would dominate Yeats' mind and art the rest of his life.
Locating the contours of Yeats' shift in-viewpoint, then, provides the key to understanding the man and his mature work. The present study does just that, tracing the origin, development, and elaboration of Yeats' tragic perspective, from its theoretical underpinnings to its poetic triumphs. Above all, this study supplies the basic context of Yeats* careers why he took the path he did, and how he wove all that he found along the way into a remarkable fabric.
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Swartz, Laura A. "Occulture : W.B. Yeats' prose fiction and the late ninteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival." CardinalScholar 1.0, 2010. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1560843.
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In addition to being a respected poet, dramatist, essayist, and statesman, William Butler Yeats was a dedicated student of the occult and practicing magician for most of his adult life. In spite of his dedication, Yeats’ commitment to occultism has often been ridiculed as “bughouse” (as Ezra Pound put it), shunted to the margins of academic discourse, or ignored altogether. Yeats’ occult-focused prose fiction—the occult trilogy of stories “Rosa Alchemica,” “The Tables of the Law,” and “The Adoration of the Magi” and the unfinished novel The Speckled Bird—has often received similarly dismissive treatment. Some critics have accused Yeats of being an escapist or of being out of touch with the intellectual currents of his time.
However, Yeats was in touch with the intellectual currents of his time, one of which was the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occult revival. This was not a fringe movement; it was one which intersected with some of the most pressing social and cultural issues of the time. These include the dissatisfaction with mainstream religions, the renegotiation of women’s roles, the
backlash against science, and nationalism and the colonial enterprise. This intersection is what I have termed occulture.
The central purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, I demonstrate the cultural and academic relevance of the occult revival by analyzing its connections to these critical issues. Second, I situate the occult trilogy and The Speckled Bird as artifacts of the occult revival and its associated facets. Through its main characters, the occult trilogy illustrates a fragmented self associated with literary modernism and with scientific challenges to individual identity from Darwin, Freud, and others. In addition, these three stories exemplify a sacralization of the domestic sphere which conflicts with the officially-sanctioned sacred spaces of mainstream religions. The Speckled Bird also reconfigures the sacred space as Michael Hearne contemplates a magical order with Irish nationalist implications. In examining these works within this historical context, I present them as texts which engage with the social and cultural landscape of the time.Occulture : occultism and the occult revival -- The occult trilogy : self and space in an occult context -- The speckled bird : sacralizing Ireland.
Department of English
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Yoo, Baekyun. "Religion and Politics in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1997. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278080/.
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Previous critics have paid insufficient attention to the political implications of Yeats's life-long preoccupation with a wide range of Western and Eastern religious traditions. Though he always preserved some skepticism about mysticism's ability to reshape the material world, the early Yeats valued the mystical idea of oneness in part because he hoped (mistakenly, as it turned out) that such oneness would bring Catholic and Protestant Ireland together in a way that might make the goals of Irish nationalism easier to accomplish. Yeats's celebration of mystical oneness does not reflect a pseudo-fascistic commitment to a static, oppressive unity. Like most mystics—and most modernists—Yeats conceived of both religious and political oneness not as a final end but rather as an ongoing process, a "way of happening" (as Auden put it).
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Saylor, Lawrence (Lawrence Emory). "W. B. Yeats's "The Cap and Bells": Its Sources in Occultism." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1995. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278020/.
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While it may seem that "The Cap and Bells" finds its primary source in Yeats's love for Maud Gonne, the poem is also symbolic of his search for truth in occultism. In the 1880s and 90s Yeats coupled his reading of Shelley with a formal study of magic in the Golden Dawn, and the poem is a blend of Shelleyan and occult influences. The essay explores the Shelleyan/occult motif of death and rebirth through examining the poem's relation to the rituals, teachings, and symbols of the Golden Dawn. The essay examines the poem's relation to the Cabalistic Tree of Life, the Hanged Man of the Tarot, two Golden Dawn diagrams on the Garden of Eden, and the concept of Kundalini.
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De, Gruchy John. "W.B. Yeats's Japan : more myth than reality." Thesis, McGill University, 1991. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=50844.
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This thesis analyses the development of Yeats's image of Japan from his introduction to Japanese culture through 'Japonisme' in the mid-1880's, until the end of his life in 1939. It also surveys the sources of information that Yeats had on Japan other than the Noh drama, and shows how these sources were as important as the Noh, if not more, in defining his image of Japan as an artistic utopia. Three periods of Japanese history were of particular interest to Yeats: The early nineteenth century, in which most Japanese colour prints were produced; the Ashikaga period (1333-1573), when the Noh flourished, and Heian Japan (794-1100), an extraordinary culture which produced some of the world's greatest works of art. Images of Japanese culture from these periods combined to produce a composite, mythical vision of Japan in Yeats's imagination.
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Lee, Deng-Huei. "The Evolution of Yeats's Dance Imagery: The Body, Gender, and Nationalism." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2003. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc4312/.
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Tracing the development of his dance imagery, this dissertation argues that Yeats's collaborations with various early modern dancers influenced his conceptions of the body, gender, and Irish nationalism. The critical tendency to read Yeats's dance emblems in light of symbolist-decadent portrayals of Salome has led to exaggerated charges of misogyny, and to neglect of these emblems' relationship to the poet's nationalism. Drawing on body criticism, dance theory, and postcolonialism, this project rereads the politics that underpin Yeats's idea of the dance, calling attention to its evolution and to the heterogeneity of its manifestations in both written texts and dramatic performances. While the dancer of Yeats's texts follow the dictates of male-authored scripts, those in actual performances of his works acquired more agency by shaping choreography. In addition to working directly with Michio Ito and Ninette de Valois, Yeats indirectly collaborated with such trailblazers of early modern dance as Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, Maud Allan, and Ruth St. Denis. These collaborations shed important light on the germination of early modern dance and on current trends in the performative arts. Registering anti-imperialist and anti-industrialist agendas, the early Yeats's dancing Sidhe personify a romantic nationalism that seeks to inspire resistance to the cultural machinery of British colonization. In his middle career, these collective Sidhe transmute into the solitary figure of a bird-woman-witch dancer, who, resembling the soloists of early modern dance, occupies center stage without any support from men and (to some extent) contests patriarchal assumptions. The late Yeats satirizes the imposition of sexual, racial, and religious purity on postcolonial Irish identity by means of Salome-like dances in which "fair" dancers hold the severed heads of "foul" spectators. These dances blur customary socio-political boundaries between fair and foul, classical and grotesque. Early to late, the evolution of Yeats's dancers reflects his gradual incorporation of more innovative female roles partly resembling those created by the pioneers of modern dance.
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Brady, Bronwyn. "The idea of gaiety in Yeats's lyric poetry." Thesis, Rhodes University, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1015642.
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In June 1917 W.B. Yeats wrote to his father : Much of your thought resembles mine . . but mine is part of a religious system more or less logically worked out, a system which will I hope interest you as a form of poetry. I find the setting it all in order has helped my verse, has given me a new framework and new patterns. (Wade 1954, 627) The new framework and new patterns that he claimed to have found in his system generated a new, and for Yeats, radically different sort of poetry. Before 1919 (The Wild Swans at Coole), the poetry had as its subject various traditional themes: the pity of love; the romance and heroism of Irish mythology; the threat of age, change and death. The poetry up to this point is, formally speaking, highly skillful, but locked into its own admissions of failure to touch or incorporate reality in any but a romantically defeatist way. However, the order which Yeats refers to in his letter, and the system he generated as a propaedeutic to this new order, once assimilated into the habit and texture of the poetry, generated new topics of its own which made those of the earlier work seem subjective, self- indulgent and intellectually uninformed. Yeats's poetry now changed drastically in focus and form, from subjective to objective poetry. Whereas the earlier poetry had opposed reality with romantic heroism or selfdestructive despondency, the poetry subsequent to his change of practice, incorporates a new vision of reality as the intrinsic architechtonics of poetry itself. Now the measure of human and aesthetic completion is no longer an inexplicable and inscrutable sadness, but an intelligent and informed detachment, an energy of mind that Yeats called "gaiety". My thesis explores this energy of mind and what it meant for Yeats and his poetry. My contention is that the idea of gaiety provides a way for Yeats to grant meaning to his life, a way for him to create himself. As the poetry is completed thanks to the new system, so is the poet. In order to see this, it is necessary to read the poems as a series of collections, or stories, that resonate back and forth with meaning and qualification and understanding. Yeats's system is his myth, and he writes his poetry in terms of and informed by that myth, shaping and re-shaping the experience of the created and fictional self until it has meaning in a way that the real self does not. The thesis explores this process of creation firstly in theoretical terms, using Lotman's ideas of Story and Myth, and looking at Yeats's intellectual and poetic inheritance. It goes on to examine some of the great poems in an attempt to define gaiety, and how Yeats achieves it in the poetry, and then to look at the early, pre-system poems to see how they differ. Finally, it takes the last of Yeats's lyric collections, Last Poems, and shows how gaiety works in the most mature poetry when the poems are read as narrative events within a story.
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Pagel, Amber Noelle. ""How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?": Cognitive Poetics and the Poetry of William Butler Yeats's." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2017. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc984126/.
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Cognitive poetics, the recently developed field of literary theory which utilizes principles from cognitive science and cognitive linguistics to examine literature, is applied in this study to an exploration of the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The theoretical foundation for this approach is embodiment theory, the concept from cognitive linguistics that language is an embodied phenomenon and that meaning and meaning construction are bodily processes grounded in our sensorimotor experiences. A systematic analysis including conceptual metaphors, image schemas, cognitive mappings, mental spaces, and cognitive grammar is applied here to selected poems of Yeats to discover how these models can inform our readings of these poems. Special attention is devoted to Yeats's interest in the mind's eye, his crafting of syntax in stanzaic development, his atemporalization through grammar, and the antinomies which converge in selected symbols from his poems.
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Manicom, David 1960. "Romantic nationalism and the unease of history : the depiction of political violence in Yeats's poetry." Thesis, McGill University, 1988. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=75915.
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Yeats's depiction of political violence is examined through a reading of the political poetry centred on "Easter 1916," "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen," and "Meditations in Time of Civil War," each of these bearing a title emphasizing the poem's historicality, each representing one of the violent epochs in modern Ireland. By studying the dramatized narrative persona utilized by Yeats--a persona constituting the ideological and societal contexts of the poem, and effecting, through the choice of perspective, the selection of historical materials--the particular contents of Yeats's history-making are brought into focus. Yeats was both a romantic poet uneasy with the political component of verse, and an Irish nationalist for whom these events were essential ingredients of his life's work. In these poems we find the collision of Yeats's own conflicting ideals about poetry, politics, and history; a collision which produces a complex portrayal of Irish political violence.
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Tracy, Hannah R. "Willing progress: The literary Lamarckism of Olive Schreiner, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10596.
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ix, 288 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.While the impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on Victorian and modernist literature has been well-documented, very little critical attention has been paid to the influence of Lamarckian evolutionary theory on literary portrayals of human progress during this same period. Lamarck's theory of inherited acquired characteristics provided an attractive alternative to the mechanism and materialism of Darwin's theory of natural selection for many writers in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, particularly those who refused to relinquish the role of the individual will in the evolutionary process. Lamarckian rhetoric permeated an ideologically diverse range of discourses related to progress, including reproduction, degeneration, race, class, eugenics, education, and even art. By analyzing the literary texts of Olive Schreiner, G.B. Shaw, and W.B. Yeats alongside their polemical writing, I demonstrate how Lamarckism inflected these writers' perceptions of the mechanism of human evolution and their ideas about human progress, and I argue that their work helped to sustain Lamarck's cultural influence beyond his scientific relevance. In the dissertation's introduction, I place the work of these three writers in the context of the Neo-Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary debates in order to establish the scientific credibility and cultural attractiveness of Lamarckism during this period. Chapter II argues that Schreiner creates her own evolutionary theory that rejects the cold, competitive materialism inherent in Darwinism and builds upon Lamarck's mechanism, modifying Lamarckism to include a uniquely feminist emphasis on the importance of community, motherhood, and self-sacrifice for the betterment of the human race. In Chapter III, I demonstrate that Shaw's "metabiological" religion of Creative Evolution, as portrayed in Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah , is not simply Bergsonian vitalism repackaged as a Neo-Lamarckian evolutionary theory but, rather, a uniquely Shavian theory of human progress that combines religious, philosophical, and political elements and is thoroughly steeped in contemporary evolutionary science. Finally, Chapter IV examines the interplay between Yeats's aesthetics and his anxieties about class in both his poetry and his 1939 essay collection On the Boiler to show how Lamarckian modes of thought inflected his understanding of degeneration and reproduction and eventually led him to embrace eugenics.
Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Mark Quigley, Member, English; Paul Farber, Member, Not from U of O; Richard Stein, Member, English; John McCole, Outside Member, History
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Wong, Kuok. "The ghost story across cultures : a study of Liaozhai Zhiyi by Pu Songling and the Celtic Twilight by William Butler Yeats." Thesis, University of Macau, 2008. http://umaclib3.umac.mo/record=b1943892.
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Estrade, Charlotte. "" Mythomorphoses " écriture du mythe, écriture métapoétique chez Basil Bunting, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound et W. B. Yeats." Phd thesis, Université du Maine, 2012. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00770332.
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Les mythologies - gréco-romaine, irlandaise, perse, indienne, japonaise, chinoise -sont omniprésentes dans la poésie de Bunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats. Les prédilections desauteurs pour certaines mythologies, véritables choix identitaires et politiques, montrenttoutefois une péroccupation commune pour les mythes violents, aux niveaux martial et sexuel.Ce premier niveau thématique se combine avec une réflexion plus distanciée sur le mythe,outil critique qui permet la reformulation de croyances rituelles et spirituelles, et de nouvellesthéories poétiques qui visent à ordonner et donner un sens au monde chaotique du XXe siècle.Le mythe, subversif, permet donc l'articulation de nouvelles spiritualités et denouvelles expériences poétiques. Enfin, matériau vivant et modelable, dont la mention est à lafois un raccourci de récits anciens et un horizon élargi vers d'autres références et réécritures,le mythe est objet linguistique. En traduction, le mythe transfert les contenus thématiques,déplace les rythmes et fait circuler et s'entremêler les arts. En effet, retour fantasmé à uneorigine du langage artistique, le mythe est parfois fiction d'un art total où les figuresmythiques seraient à la fois objet linguistique, représentation imaginaire picturale etmanifestation musicale. De cette vision du mythe émane une poésie polyphonique et hybride,à l'image du centaure et des autres créatures monstrueuses présents dans l'oeuvre poétique deBunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats.
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Tomkins, David S. "Remembering the Forgotten Beauty of Yeatsian Mythology: Personae and the Problem of Unity in The Wind Among the Reeds." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2235/.
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Poinsot, Claire. ""Poussières de Mnémosyne". Les pathologies de la mémoire collective et individuelle dans le théâtre de W. B. Yeats et J. M. Synge (1892-1939)." Thesis, Sorbonne Paris Cité, 2016. http://www.theses.fr/2016USPCA119.
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Depuis les débuts de W. B. Yeats en tant que dramaturge dans les années 1890, le personnage de théâtre irlandais semble pris dans une tempête de mémoire, chavirant entre deux écueils également mortifères, l’impossibilité d’oublier (hypermnésie) et celle de se souvenir (amnésie). Cette crise de la mémoire et par conséquent de l’identité entraîne une prolifération de troubles mentaux chez les personnages et une utilisation métaphorique croissante et peut-être inconsciente de la maladie mentale par les dramaturges comme théâtralisation des bouleversements de la société contemporaine. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) et J. M. Synge (1871-1909) font de la mémoire dysfonctionnelle non seulement l’un des thèmes centraux de leur œuvre théâtrale, mais plus encore la matière même de leur écriture, alors que la mémoire désacralisée et déstabilisée est réécrite, remodelée par une prolifération de récits mensongers et contradictoires (paramnésie). Ce travail veut alors définir le rapport entre mémoire, maladie mentale et Modernisme sur une période relativement longue (1892-1939) afin d’observer l’évolution des modes d’inscription de la mémoire à l’intérieur du texte en se centrant sur les trois troubles de la mémoire identifiés à l’époque et à la lumière desquels seront étudiées successivement les pièces. Il s’agit de faire un aller-retour entre la perception intuitive de la mémoire par la littérature et les théories psychiatriques contemporaines, l’hypothèse centrale étant que le texte théâtral intègre certaines notions cliniques dans l’étude de la mémoire, ce qui permettrait de voir dans cette relation entre texte médical et texte théâtral l’un des éléments d’un (pré-)Modernisme irlandaisEver since Yeats started writing plays in the 1890s, the Irish character seems to be struggling between two opposite pitfalls of memory: on the one hand an impossibility for him to forget, and the other hand an impossibility to retain memories. This memory crisis, which entails an identity crisis, leads to an increasing staging of mental disorders by the playwrights to represent, perhaps involuntarily, a destabilised contemporary society. W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and J. M. Synge (1871-1909) use mental disorder not only as a theme, but also as a literary ploy as memories in their plays are relived and reconstructed in misleading and contradictory tales. This work focuses on the relationship between memory, mental disorder and Modernism in a long period (1892-1939) in order to underline the evolutions of the representation of dysfunctional memory in the texts. It successively examines the plays in the light of the three major memory disorders identified by psychiatrists at the time: amnesia, hypermnesia and paramnesia. This work relies on a parallel reading of the intuitive perception of memory by literature and the contemporary psychiatric theories, the underlying hypothesis being that some clinical notions of memory dysfunctions have been integrated to the theatrical corpus, which could be a feature of an Irish (early) Modernism
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Duncan, Dawn E. (Dawn Elaine). "Language and Identity in Post-1800 Irish Drama." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc277916/.
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Using a sociolinguistic and post-colonial approach, I analyze Irish dramas that speak about language and its connection to national identity. In order to provide a systematic and wide-ranging study, I have selected plays written at approximately fifty-year intervals and performed before Irish audiences contemporary to their writing. The writers selected represent various aspects of Irish society--religiously, economically, and geographically--and arguably may be considered the outstanding theatrical Irish voices of their respective generations. Examining works by Alicia LeFanu, Dion Boucicault, W.B. Yeats, and Brian Friel, I argue that the way each of these playwrights deals with language and identity demonstrates successful resistance to the destruction of Irish identity by the dominant language power. The work of J. A. Laponce and Ronald Wardhaugh informs my language dominance theory. Briefly, when one language pushes aside another language, the cultural identity begins to shift. The literature of a nation provides evidence of the shifting perception. Drama, because of its performance qualities, provides the most complex and complete literary evidence. The effect of the performed text upon the audience validates a cultural reception beyond what would be possible with isolated readers. Following a theoretical introduction, I analyze the plays in chronological order. Alicia LeFanu's The Sons of Erin; or, Modern Sentiment (1812) gently pleads for equal treatment in a united Britain. Dion Boucicault's three Irish plays, especially The Colleen Bawn (1860) but also Arrah-na-Pogue (1864) and The Shaughraun (1875), satirically conceal rebellious nationalist tendencies under the cloak of melodrama. W. B. Yeats's The Countess Cathleen (1899) reveals his romantic hope for healing the national identity through the powers of language. However, The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919) and The Death of Cuchulain (1939) reveal an increasing distrust of language to mythically heal Ireland. Brian Friel's Translations (1980), supported by The Communication Cord (1982) and Making History (1988), demonstrates a post-colonial move to manipulate history in order to tell the Irish side of a British story, constructing in the process an Irish identity that is postnational.
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Myers, Nathan C. ""Yeats" : fashioning credibility, canonicity and ethnic identity through transnational appropriation." 2012. http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/1698517.
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Over the last half century, the words of poet William Butler Yeats have been referenced in book titles, epigraphs, movies, television, and music with surprising constancy, asserting his place in our collective cultural consciousness. This study examines how and why these appropriations function to perpetuate Yeats’s elevated canonical status, provide a means of ethnic identification and legitimization, and enable the literary emergence of those who place their names alongside his. Through discussions of Frank Norris’s McTeague, W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy, I examine the complex relationship between each text and the career of both its author and Yeats to demonstrate how and why Yeats matters. Yeats himself may have donned many masks, but his poems have themselves become masks, offering his appropriators a means of identification. For Irish Americans in the early twentieth century, he offered humanity and hope in the face of Norris’s Anglo-American prejudice; he provided Auden with a site to explore his own anxieties about the place of the poet and the role of poetry in the Modern world; he legitimized Achebe’s African narrative while also supplying him with a template and the resources to interact and critique Western conceptions of history; and, for McDermott, his early poetry embodied the dream of an idealized Ireland that plagued many Irish Americans throughout the century. Ultimately, it becomes apparent that Yeats affords both cultural capital and a productive site for exploration to authors and critics who utilize his name and work, crafting and maintaining his reputation while simultaneously shaping their own.Department of English
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Dampier, Graham Anthony. "The historical system of W.B. Yeats's A vision." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10210/4769.
Full textAbstract:
D.Litt. et Phil.While the historical theory of W. B. Yeats’s A Vision (1925) has received proportionately more scholarly attention than other aspects of the system, the deeper theoretical principles that inform it have not been discussed or analysed sufficiently. Many prominent scholars of the Yeats’s corpus have rejected the need to study the system all together, while others have provided simplified accounts of the historical theory elucidated in Book IV “The Great Year of the Ancients” and Book V “Dove or Swan”. A detailed study of A Vision’s historical theory is sorely needed, as we know little of how it operates at a deeper theoretical level. This thesis approached this lack by elucidating the theoretical foundation that Yeats’s discussion of history in “Dove or Swan” is based on. This required an analysis of Yeats’s idiosyncratic use of the ancient Greek concept of the “Great Year”. Yeats’s elucidation of the “Great Year” derives its distinction from the Automatic Script, which the system of A Vision is based on. In the process, Yeats’s treatment of the evolution of the “Great Year” from Plato through Ptolemy to modern astrologers was discussed. This required a lengthy and thorough examination of the geometry that informs A Vision’s historical system. This geometric scheme is complex and requires careful consideration, for it is easy to confuse the movement represented in each figure. This study provides illustrations that are derived from Yeats’s descriptions of diagrams and from his instructions of how to interpret the movement that occurs within them. This results in diagrammatic representations that have never been utilised and analysed to such a comprehensive extent. A by-product of providing an extensive and comprehensive account of the geometry that informs the historical theory of A Vision is the emergence of a barely discussed, but very crucial, geometric and theoretical component of the historical system, the line of interacting periods. The line of interacting periods represents each historical period and event as being constituted by the Four Faculties; Will, Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate. In effect, this line allows for an analysis of the historical system that incorporates not only the Faculties but other theoretical components of the system of A Vision as well, which includes the twenty-eight phases of the Great Wheel and the strife between the primary and antithetical tinctures. When “Dove or Swan” is viewed from this theoretical perspective Yeats’s discussion of history reveals itself to be an application of the system’s fundamental tenets to four thousand years of European history. It tries, in this way, to maintain the internal cohesion of the system as a whole. Every historical event, period and figure signifies the fluctuating dominance of one tincture over the other. Yeats’s emphasis on the development of European aesthetics results in a discussion of movements that seeks to reveal the primary and antithetical components at work during any given period of European art. Yeats’s selective interest in European history and art suggests that “Dove or Swan” is not a complete discussion of the people and events that shaped modern Europe. From one point of view, it represents an amateur historian’s quest to find empirical justification for a theory that he claims to have gleaned from a supernatural source. Seen from another angle “Dove or Swan” represents poet’s effort to apply metaphors, meant for poetry, to empirical historical data.
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Meihuizen, Nicholas Clive Titherley. "Yeats and individuation : an exploration of archetypes in the work of W.B. Yeats." Thesis, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10413/11300.
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"Reading Beckett and Yeats from a crosscultural perspective: a reader-oriented approach." 2005. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5892488.
Full textAbstract:
Li Mei-yee.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-106).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
摘要 --- p.iii
Acknowledgements --- p.iv
Contents --- p.vi
Introduction: Questions about Reading --- p.1
Chapter Chapter 1 --- Waiting for Godot and the Issue of Absurdity --- p.28
Chapter Chapter 2 --- At the Hawk's Well and the Drama of the Interior --- p.59
Conclusion --- p.90
Note --- p.100
Works Cited --- p.101
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"Imagistic action: an interdisciplinary study of poetic tension in Yeats' theatre." 2000. http://library.cuhk.edu.hk/record=b5895814.
Full textAbstract:
by Wong Hing Yi.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 131-137).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Introduction --- p.1
Chapter Chapter One --- "“The Last Romantic or the First Modern?"": in the light of the predecessors and contemporaries" --- p.7
Chapter Chapter Two --- "“More than Cool Reason"": a study of the poetic metaphor in Yeats's poems" --- p.29
Chapter Chapter Three --- """An illusion that should not be quite an illusion"": a study of the visual image in Yeats´ةs plays" --- p.51
Chapter Chapter Four --- Image as Action: Yeats as the forerunner of the modern theatre --- p.80
Conclusion --- p.112
Illustrations --- p.119
References --- p.131