Words Alone
Yeats is usually seen as a great modernist innovator. This book goes against the grain to explore the Irish literary traditions that preceded and influenced him--romantic 'national tales' in post-Union Ireland, the poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult novels of Sheridan LeFanu, and William Carleton's 'peasant fictions'.
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W. B. Yeats is usually seen as a great innovator who put his stamp so decisively on modern Irish literature that most of his successors worked in his shadow. Words Alone looks at the Irish literary traditions that preceded him, including romantic 'national tales' in post-Union Ireland (and Scotland), the nationalist poetry and polemic of the Young Ireland movement, the occult and supernatural fictions of Sheridan LeFanu, the 'peasant fictions' of William Carleton, and fairy-lore and folktale-collectors. As well as placing these nineteenth-century literary movements in a rich contemporary context of politics, polemic and social tension, it discusses recent critical and interpretive approaches to these phenomena; but the unifying theme is the use Yeats made of his literary predecessors during his own apprenticeship, and the part that a self-conscious use of Irish literary tradition played in the construction of his path-breaking early work, critical as well as creative.
