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'We Irish' in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone
W.J. McCormack
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Description for 'We Irish' in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone
Hardcover. W. B. Yeats went to great lengths to design his self-image which biographers have been slow to challenge. Following on from Blood Kindred (2005), Mc Cormack’s new study of the poet’s idealist views concentrates on the role of J. M. Hone in introducing him to George Berkeley’s philosophy in the mid 1920s and to contemporary Italian thinkers such as Giovanni Gentile and Mario Manlio Rossi. The notion of sacrifice is examined and, by way of contrast, work by Synge, George Moore and Samuel Beckett is shown to challenge the demand for sacrifice which underlies many powerful philosophies of culture. This is a detailed and yet wide-ranging critique of twentieth-century Irish literature, illuminating both well-known and obscure figures.
W.B. Yeats went to great lengths to design his self-image which biographers have been slow to challenge. Following on from "Blood Kindred" (2005), Mc Cormack's new study of the poet's idealist views concentrates on the role of J.M. Hone in introducing him to George Berkeley's philosophy in the mid 1920s and to contemporary Italian thinkers such as Giovanni Gentile and Mario Manlio Rossi. The notion of sacrifice is examined and, by way of contrast, work by Synge, George Moore and Samuel Beckett is shown to challenge the demand for sacrifice which underlies many powerful philosophies of culture. This is a detailed and yet wide-ranging critique of twentieth-century Irish literature, illuminating both well-known and obscure figures.
Product Details
Format
Hardback
Publication date
2010
Publisher
University College Dublin Press Dublin
Condition
New
Number of Pages
224
Place of Publication
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN
9781906359430
SKU
V9781906359430
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 7 to 11 working days
Ref
99-19
About W.J. McCormack
W. J. Mc Cormack retired as Professor of Literary History at Goldsmiths College (University of London) in 2002. For some years he has concentrated on biography, including Fool of the Family: A Life of J. M. Synge (2000). In 2005, he published a political biography Blood Kindred: W. B. Yeats, the Life, the Death, the Politics which treated at length the poet's relations with Nazi Germany and his interest in French royalist authoritarianism. He is currently writing a life of the Ulster poet, John Hewitt. Since 2006, he has been Keeper at the Edward Worth Library (1733), Dublin. As the poet Hugh Maxton, he was elected a member of Aosdana in the 1980s, and published his first novel, Twenty16 Vision, in 2009.
Reviews for 'We Irish' in Europe: Yeats, Berkeley and Joseph Hone
'Mc Cormack is a retired professor of literary history at Goldsmith's College in London. As well as a life of J. M. Synge, he wrote a political biography of W. B. Yeats which concentrated on the poet's relations with Nazi Germany and his interest in French royalist authoritarianism. This book is on something of a related theme as Mc Cormack examines Yeats's relationship with publisher J. M. Hone who introduced him to the philosophy of George Berkeley and to the writings of contemporary Italian thinkers Giovanni Gentile and Mario Manlio Rossi. The central tenet of their thinking was the idea of sacrifice and this found its way into Yeats's own work. Mc Cormack's role is that of a revisionist in that he questions the self-image which Yeats carefully constructed and which, Mc Cormack maintains, biographers accepted. In looking at Yeats's work he brings in for the purpose of contrast the writings os Synge, George Moore and Beckett. These latter three had no time for the notion of sacrifice and indeed challenged it. In so doing Mc Cormack highlights the influence of a particular strand of European thought on Yeats and shows how this made him different from his Irish contemporaries.' Books Ireland Summer 2010