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.

'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses William Butler Yeats' father was an impoverished artist, an inveterate letter writer, and a man crippled by his inability to ever finish a painting. Oscar Wilde's father was a doctor, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange foreshadowing of events that would later befall his son. The father of James Joyce was a garrulous, hard-drinking man with a violent temper, unable or unwilling to provide for his large family, who eventually drove his son from Ireland. In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín presents an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history and literature told through the lives and works of Ireland's most famous sons, and the complicated, influential relationships they each maintained with their fathers. 'A supple, subtle thinker, alive to hunts and undertones, wary of absolute truths.' New Statesman 'Tóibín writes about writers' families...with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence.' Sunday Telegraph

Examines the lives and careers of four distinguished Irish authors and analyzes the connections among them.

Irish literature after Yeats and Joyce, from the 1920s onwards, includes texts that have been the subject of much contention. For a start, how should Irish literature be defined: as works which have been written in Irish or as works written in English by the Irish? It is a period in which ideas of Ireland--of people, community, and nation--have been both created and reflected, and in which conceptions of a distinct Irish identity have been articulated, defended, and challenged; a period which has its origins in a time of intense political turmoil. Corcoran focuses his chapters on various themes such as "the Big House," and the rural and the provincial and offers discussions of authors ranging from Kinsella and Beckett to William Trevor, Seamus Heaney, and Mary Lavin, to provide a lucid and far-reaching introduction to modern Irish writing.

How can we use art to reconstruct ourselves and the material world? Is every individual an art object? Is the material world an art text? This book answers these questions by examining modernist literature, especially James Joyce and W.B. Yeats, in the context of anarchist intellectual thought and Georges Sorel's theory of social myth.

Annie West's irreverent art brings to life W.B. Yeats's futile pursuit of the beautiful, unobtainable Maud Gonne. Introduced by Theo Dorgan, and complete with poetry by Yeats as well as quotes by those who bore witness to his infatuation, including Katharine Tynan, Douglas Hyde and his own sisters, Lolly and Lily, Yeats in Love is a truly original depiction of a decades-long adolescent crush.