Literature Studies

This is a genre-crossing collection of interviews and essays that recounts in intimate detail encounters with many of the world's foremost writers.

By examining Yeats's worldmaking capacity to engage with the Irish past, this book offers a new understanding of Yeats's revivalism and its relation to his modernism. It considers, through close reading and contextual analysis, the nature of Yeats's achievements and innovations in poetry, drama, essays, autobiography, and occult philosophy.

'Romanticism had its roots in fantasy and fed on myth'. This book analyses the Romantic vision of the Orient from Ottoman Turkey, through the Middle East, including Egypt and Persia, to the Vale of Kashmir - fascination with the exotic Orient mixed with distaste for despotic rule.

It also offers the first sustained application of linguistic pragmatics, the study of meaning in interaction, to the work of a single author, opening up questions about how analytical paradigms developed in pragmatics can explain how rewriting can affect the interactive relationship between a literary text and its readers.

An examination of the career of William Butler Yeats with special emphasis upon his connection with English Renaissance literature. Amongst other topics, it looks at the influence on his work of such writers as Arnold, Spenser, Jonson, Milton and Donne.

An exploration into the "strange science of writing", in which the author reflects on the writing process and explores three distinct areas essential for "great" writing: the crucial role dreams play in literary inspiration; the importance of depth; and the notion of death.

A critical work about one of the leading figures in modern poetry, this book shows how Yeats perfected great songs - "Crazy Jane on the Day of Judgment", "Three Things", "After Long Silence", "Her Triumph" - and great choruses - "Colonus' Praise", "From 'OEdipus at Colonus'" and "From the 'Antigone'".