Words Alone

Yeats and his Inheritances

R. F. Foster

New book from celebrated historian and prize-winning biographer, R. F. Foster
Repositions Yeats as an inheritor of a nineteenth-century traditions, rather than simply as a creator of literary modernism in the twentieth century
A suggestive, original survey of themes in nineteenth-century Irish literature, including romanticism, nationalism, and occultism
Provides a new perspective on the Irish Literary Revival of the late nineteenth century

Words Alone

Yeats and his Inheritances

R. F. Foster

Description

R. F. Foster's two-volume biography of Yeats was hailed in the New York Review of Books as "a triumph of scholarship, thought, and empathy such as one would hardly have thought possible in this age of disillusion." Now, Foster turns his focus to the largely unacknowledged influences that shaped the young W. B. Yeats.

So dramatic and revolutionary was Yeats' impact on Irish literature that the writers and traditions that preceded him are often overlooked, just as his successors are often overshadowed by his achievement. In Words Alone, Foster explores the Irish literary traditions that preceded Yeats, 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 the fairy-lore and folktale collections Yeats absorbed. As well as placing these nineteenth-century literary movements in a rich contemporary context of politics, polemic, and social tension, Foster discusses recent critical and interpretive approaches to these phenomena. But the unifying theme throughout the book is the self-conscious use Yeats made of his literary predecessors during his own apprenticeship, particularly in the construction of his path-breaking early work.

Words Alone

Yeats and his Inheritances

R. F. Foster

Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. National Tales and National Futures in Ireland and Scotland after the Union
2. The First Romantics: Young Irelands between Catholic Emancipation and the Famine
3. Lost in the Big House: Anglo-Irishry and the Uses of the Supernatural
4. Oisin Comes Home: Yeats as Inheritor

Words Alone

Yeats and his Inheritances

R. F. Foster

Author Information

R. F. Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a fellow of Hertford College. His books include Modern Ireland 1600-1972, Luck and the Irish, and the prize-winning two-volume biography, W.B. Yeats: A Life (OUP 1998).

Words Alone

Yeats and his Inheritances

R. F. Foster

Reviews and Awards

"R. F. Foster has made us more strongly aware of Yeats's inheritances from that Victorian Ireland so brightly and distinctly evoked in Words Alone." --The New Republic

"This richly atmospheric book both complicates and enhances our view of history and Yeats's place in it. By the simple virtue of its own excellence, it deserves a wide readership." --Adam O'Riordian, The Independent

"Foster's Yeatsian backward look proves irresistible." --Times Literary Supplement

"Illuminating...Foster writes out of impeccable research and solid grounding; luckily for us, he wears his learning lightly and expresses it in a clear and sometimes witty style."--Common Knowledge