Ebook: Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion and History

Reframing Yeats, the first critical study of its kind, traces the historical development of W. B. Yeats’s writings across the genres, examining his poetry, autobiographical writings, criticism, and drama with the same critical analysis. While existing studies of Yeats’s work choose between a biographical orientation or a formalist approach, Armstrong’s study combines the theory of New Historicism and Hermeneutics: a theoretical approach that takes Yeatsian scholarship one step further. Grounded in history and informed by recent studies, this innovative approach presents new interpretations and understandings of Yeats’s texts. As well as providing a fresh reading of “Among School Children” and situating his autobiographical writings in relation to preceding Victorian practices and contemporary experimentation, this groundbreaking work documents some of the most important existing readings of Yeats’s relationship to history, Modernism and the literary genres.