Progress & Identity in the Plays of W.B. Yeats, 1892-1907

Download or read book Progress & Identity in the Plays of W.B. Yeats, 1892-1907 written by Barbara A. Suess and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Progress and Identity in the Poems of W. B. Yeats explores the ways in which Yeats's plays offer an alternative form of progress via a philosophical system of opposites: Always seeking the opposite, the nature of which changes as we change, we continually augment our personalities, and ultimately improve society, with the inclusion of the Other. This system, which eventually became Yeats's doctrine of the mask, provided his contemporaries with a method of changing what science, Platonism, and Victorian bourgeois ideologies claimed to be inescapable qualities of self. Progress and Identityn relocates Yeats's literary, social, and political relevance from his essentializing cultural nationalism to his later, more broad-minded definitions of progress.