Description: 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes:
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