Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 That sweet insinuating feminine voice: hysterics, peasants, and the Celtic movement
- 2 Fair Erin as landlord: femininity and Anglo-Irish politics in The Countess Cathleen
- 3 When the mob becomes a people: nationalism and occult theatre
- 4 In the bedroom of the Big House: kindred, crisis, and Anglo-Irish nationality
- 5 Desiring women: feminine sexuality and Irish nationality in “A Woman Young and Old”
- 6 The rule of kindred: eugenics, Purgatory, and Yeats's race philosophy
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 That sweet insinuating feminine voice: hysterics, peasants, and the Celtic movement
- 2 Fair Erin as landlord: femininity and Anglo-Irish politics in The Countess Cathleen
- 3 When the mob becomes a people: nationalism and occult theatre
- 4 In the bedroom of the Big House: kindred, crisis, and Anglo-Irish nationality
- 5 Desiring women: feminine sexuality and Irish nationality in “A Woman Young and Old”
- 6 The rule of kindred: eugenics, Purgatory, and Yeats's race philosophy
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
One can only reach out into the universe with a gloved hand, and that glove is one's nation, the only thing one knows even a little of.
LNI, 174You cannot keep the idea of a nation alive where there are no national institutions to reverence, no national success to admire, without a model of it in the mind of the people. You can call it “Cathleen ni Houlihan” or the “Shan van Voght” in a mood of simple feeling, and love that image, but for the general purposes of life you must have a complex mass of images, something like an architect's model.
AY, 334–5Yeats's Nations sets out the changing ways Yeats imagined Irishness. I argue that each one depends upon specific configurations of gender and class. In order to focus on the interactions between Irishness and other categories, this book recasts the question of the poet's nationalism as the question of his diverse conceptions of nationality. The question of nationalism tends to produce reductive analyses that are largely confined to attacking or defending Yeats's politics or to revealing the presence or absence of nationalism. The question of nationality, in contrast, emphasizes the particular structures of his various conceptions of Irishness, their relation to social, political and cultural discourses, and their changes and continuities over time. This shift also enables re-evaluations of Yeats's representations of women and the role the occult plays in his thought and work.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Yeats's NationsGender, Class, and Irishness, pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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