The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts - (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities) (Hardcover)

About the Book

The first book to comprehensively address W.B. Yeats's engagements across the arts as both writer and cultural worker

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

The volume offers a critical and valuable exploration of Yeats's extraordinary work and career.

Summing Up: Highly recommended.

--J. S. Baggett, Lander University "CHOICE"

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.

--Marjorie Howes, Boston College

About the Author

Charles I. Armstrong is Professor of English Literature at the University of Agder. He is the author of three monographs, including Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History (2013). He is currently the president of the International Yeats Society and academic co-director of the Yeats International Summer School.

Adrian Paterson is Lecturer in English at the University of Galway. Curator of the multimedia exhibition Yeats & the West and a director at the Yeats Thoor Ballylee Society, he is President of Modernist Studies Ireland, co-editor of two E-rea special issues on modernism, and publishes widely on literature, music, art and technology from the eighteenth century to the present.

Tom Walker is an Associate Professor in Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. His publications on various aspects of Irish writing and modern poetry include Louis MacNeice and the Irish Poetry of his Time (2015), which was awarded the Robert Rhodes Prize for Literature by the American Conference for Irish Studies.