Title: Yeats and Joyce
First published: 2008
Description: "While postcolonial studies has contributed much to our understanding of Irish modernism, it has also encouraged less-than-accurate portrayals of Joyce and Yeats as polar opposites: Yeats as the inventor of Irish mystique and Joyce as its relentless demythologiser. Alistair Cormack's complex study provides a corrective to these misleading characterisations by analysing the tools Yeats and Joyce themselves used to challenge representation in the postcolonial era. Despite their very different histories, Cormack suggests, these two writers can be seen as allies in their insistence on the heresy of the imagination. Reinvigorating and politicising the history of ideas as a powerful medium for studying literature, he shows that Joyce and Yeats independently challenged a linearity and materialism they identified with empire. Both celebrated Ireland as destabilising the accepted forms of thought and the accepted means of narrating the nation. Thus, 'unreadable' modernist works such as Finnegans Wake and A Vision must be understood as attempts to reconceptualise history in a literally postcolonial period."--Jacket.
Subjects: Criticism and interpretation, English literature, Literature and society, Intellectual life, History and criticism, Modernism (Literature), Irish authors, History in literature, National characteristics, Irish, in literature, Postcolonialism in literature, History, Yeats, w. b. (william butler), 1865-1939, Joyce, james, 1882-1941, Authors, irish, Littérature anglaise, Auteurs irlandais, Histoire et critique, Littérature et société, Histoire, Modernisme (Littérature), Postcolonialisme dans la littérature, Histoire dans la littérature, Vie intellectuelle, POETRY, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh
Places: Ireland
People: W. B. Yeats (1865-1939), James Joyce (1882-1941)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PR5907 .C57 2008