Marjorie Howes is associate professor of English at Boston College.
“In Yeats and Afterwords, editors Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente
have collected a compelling selection of essays by twelve of the
leading scholars in Irish studies around the concept of
‘belatedness’ in the work of W.B. Yeats. Although ‘afterwords’ and
‘belatedness’ may seem like conveniently vague rubrics to connect
dissimilar essays, Yeats’ ‘intricate nexus of temporal vectors’ is
consistently and impressively central to each peace.” —James Joyce
Quarterly
“Overall, Yeats and Afterwords is a focused look at the most
prevalent aspect of Yeats’ work and offers new connections—and
sometimes surprising conclusions—with respect to the way the poet
may have understood his own project. The editors thoroughly account
for every facet of Yeats’ belatedness and the structure of the work
crystalizes the interplay across the element of time.”
—Symploke
“Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente’s critically important
introduction not only suggests that a ‘powerful, multilayered sense
of cultural belatedness’ is key to Yeats’ complex literary method,
but also teases out the larger significance of this volume, which
indeed makes many revealing interventions not only in Yeats studies
but also in studies of the Irish Revival, Irish modernism, and
contemporary Irish poetry. . . Taking the theme of ‘belatedness’. .
. what this important volume achieves is to reveal new ways of
seeing ‘belatedness’, revision, temporality and legacy as being
central, underpinning factors in Yeats’s poetic structures
throughout his career.” —Irish Studies Review
“This is a superb collection of essays, only one of which, Ronald
Schuchard’s on Yeats’s influence in contemporary Irish poetry, is
previously published. The editors’ helpful introduction defines the
perspective that frames the volume, Yeats’s deliberate
belatedness.” —Irish Literary Supplement
"While each of the essays in this volume examine Yeats's
belatedness in diverse and unique ways, they share a common,
unifying theme that provides the book with a clear sense of purpose
and order. One of the most valuable things about this book is its
inclusivity, suggesting that it will appeal to a variety of Yeats
scholars in addition to those working within the broader field of
Irish studies." —James Joyce Literary Supplement
"This impressive collection of essays is organized around the theme
of 'Yeats's sense of cultural belatedness,' his tendency to place
himself 'at the end' of Romanticism, of the Protestant ascendancy,
of a particular cycle of civilization. . . . Several essays offer
provocative and competing readings of Yeats's late play Purgatory,
and these alone make the volume worth reading." —Choice
"The book offers a dialectical Yeats, and indeed that word recurs
throughout, as critical assumptions are trumped by the unresolved
dialogue carried in his oeuvre. A stellar cast of latter-day
Yeatsians strengthens the case for the resurgence of close reading
in Yeats studies." —Times Literary Supplement
"Although Yeats and Afterwords focuses broadly on questions of
inheritance and legacy, it marks a new departure because it
re-conceptualizes belatedness in a more complex and more
theoretically useful manner than prior studies. What impressed me
most about the collection is that the theoretical paradigms
introduced at the outset are at once defining and fluid. The
editors conceptualize belatedness in such a way that this insight
gives structure to the volume, even as it allows for a multiplicity
of readings. This volume will have a major impact on Yeats studies
and will be useful for scholars working more broadly in Irish and
modernist studies." —Rob Doggett, SUNY Geneseo
"This ground-breaking collection of essays examines Yeats's sense
of historical belatedness as theme, as trope, in formal embodiments
such as the afterword, and in his strong critical shaping of
literary history. In doing so, it historicizes Yeats's own sense of
history with unparalleled depth, while seriously acting on the
acceptance that form is itself historical. In showing how Yeats's
moulding of the past was also the creation of a future, it offers a
range of productive new starting-points for the study of this great
poet." —Edward Larrissy, emeritus, Queen's University, Belfast
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