Literature

This book analyzes the relationship between the imagination of the global and the ethical commitment to the local in environmentalist thought and writing from the 1960s to the present. Part I critically examines the emphasis on local identities and communities in North American environmentalism by establishing conceptual connections between environmentalism and ecocriticism, on one hand, and theories of globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism, on the other. It proposes the concept of “eco-cosmopolitanism” as a shorthand for envisioning these connections and the cultural and aesthetic forms into which they translate. Part II focuses on conceptualizations of environmental danger and connects environmentalist and ecocritical thought with the interdisciplinary field of risk theory in the social sciences, arguing that environmental justice theory and ecocriticism stand to benefit from closer consideration of the theories of cosmopolitanism that have arisen in this field from the analysis of transnational communities at risk. Both parts of the book combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed analyses of novels, poems, films, computer software, and installation artworks from the United States and abroad that translate new connections between global, national, and local forms of awareness into innovative aesthetic forms combining allegory, epic, and views of the planet as a whole with modernist and postmodernist strategies of fragmentation, montage, collage, and zooming.

This book conducts readings of four contemporary British poets whose work differently probes the politics of intimate speech and space: Geoffrey Hill, W. S. Graham, Don Paterson, and C. H. Sisson. The book explores the ways in which these poets, and their peers, have used address to perform public, political, and economic (as well as personal) work. In speaking to a changing succession of yous (readers and critics, purchasers and fellow writers, friends and adversaries), contemporary poetry repeatedly probes address’s powerfully public remit. The book opens up new ways into thinking about poetry’s civic clout: in Modernist and contemporary writing; in classical, early modern, and Romantic periods; in aesthetic and commercial spheres. To say you today is to perform historical work, and to rethink national, regional, and personal identities. The book engages an interplay of contemporary, Modernist, Movement, and theoretical voices, and also provides a literary history of address’s public intimacies, reading the contemporary poet as responsive to classical, medieval, early modern, and Romantic traditions. Part I, on W. S. Graham, is attentive to the public nature of the apparently private uses of addresses to known recipients. Part II, on C. H. Sisson, focuses on the use of the lyric you for national and historical negotiations. Part III turns to the late work of Geoffrey Hill, scrutinizing the addresses of the public intellectual, who hails an audience, a body of critics and reviewers, and a book-buying public. A final fourth part brings together these ideas in Don Paterson, whose historically minded addresses repeatedly depict poets provokingly compromised by their manoeuvres in the contemporary poetry industry, and demand you attend to literature’s commercial production, circulation, and reception.

This book contains a sequence of chapters exploring ways that selves and situations interact and become imaginatively identified in poems. The chapters demonstrate and exemplify how poems can be both attached to and detached from the culture, society, and conditions in which they were written. Each closely-detailed study draws out and underlines both the ubiquity and elusiveness of the self in the situation of the text. The poems are also revealed to be focal points for relations between readerly and writerly selves, and their situations in and over time. Alongside these interrelated concerns, the chapters look at ways in which poets can create and create out of relationships of a more or less trusting kind with their poems' implied, and by those means, actual readers. It also includes cases that reveal the relative absence of or wish to do without such relationships. Just as selves and situations are fugitive, so can the words be used to refer to a great variety of human predicament. The flexibility of the term situation is allowed to include a cultural moment of poetic inspiration, the atmosphere of a political crisis, the mood of a decade, the state of a nation, a condition of exile, an artistic vogue, and the endgames of lifetimes. The degree of importance these supportive situations have in the writing and reading of poetry is brought into relief by the moments of historical and personal crisis that are explored.

Unseasonable Youth examines a range of modernist-era fictions that cast doubt on the ideology of progress through the figure of stunted or endless adolescence. Novels of youth by Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Elizabeth Bowen disrupt the inherited conventions of the bildungsroman in order to criticize bourgeois values and to reinvent the biographical plot, but also to explore the contradictions inherent in mainstream developmental discourses of self, nation, and empire. The intertwined tropes of frozen youth and uneven development, as motifs of failed progress, play a crucial role in the emergence of dilatory modernist style and in the reimagination of colonial space at the fin-de-siècle. The genre-bending logic of uneven development – never wholly absent from the coming-of-age novel -- takes on a new and more intense form in modernism as it fixes its broken allegory to the problem of colonial development. In novels of unseasonable youth, the nineteenth-century idea of world progress comes up against stubborn signs of underdevelopment and uneven development, just at the same moment that post-Darwinian racial sciences and quasi-Freudian sexological discourses lend greater influence to the idea that certain forms of human difference cannot be mitigated by civilizing or developmental forces. In this historical context, the temporal meaning and social vocation of the bildungsroman undergo a comprehensive shift, as the history of the novel indexes the gradual displacement of historical-progressive thinking by anthropological-structural thinking in the Age of Empire.

This book explores how nine fascinating women inspired some of W.B. Yeats's most memorable poetry. Yeats's beliefs about poetic inspiration were remarkably akin to the Greek notion that a great poet is inspired and possessed by the feminine voices of the Muses, daughters of all powerful Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Influenced by the Pre‐Raphaelite idea of woman as ‘romantic and mysterious, still the priestess of her shrine,’ Yeats found his Muses in living women. The book examines the poetry inspired by these women in the context of the two principal Muse traditions, the Gnostic Wisdom tradition and the courtly love tradition of the troubadours, both of which can be understood as variants of the White Goddess theory propounded by Robert Graves. Given Yeats's belief that lyric poetry ‘is no rootless flower, but the speech of a man,’ exploring the relationship between poem and Muse brings new coherence to the poetry, illuminates the process of its creation, and unlocks the ‘second beauty’ to which Yeats referred when he said that ‘works of lyric genius, when the circumstances of their origin is known, gain a second a beauty, passing as it were out of literature and becoming life.’ As life emerges from the literature, the Muses are shown to be vibrant, accomplished personalities who shatter the stereotype of the Muse as a passive construct, and take their proper place as begetters of timeless poetry.

This book utilizes new source material and documents that have not previously been analysed with regard to the Abbey Theatre's history in order to reconstruct the political, socio‐religious, and economic forces that exerted pressure on the theatre's programme. These pressures resulted in a complex dynamic: the theatre's directors (including W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory) publicly defied attempts to censor the Abbey's programme in order to create profitable controversies, while they privately self‐censored plays when they anticipated an opportunity for financial gain. It argues that plays that have not previously been regarded as censored should be recognized as such in light of the political and financial pressures that motivated their suppression. Furthermore, it argues that W. B. Yeats was not an uncompromising champion of artistic freedom, as he is remembered; rather, Yeats was willing to sacrifice the freedom of the artist when he foresaw a chance to ensure the longevity of his theatre.