Yeats and Revisionism

Daniel T. O’Hara, long time review editor of Boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture (1984–2014) and currently contributing editor to symploke: a journal of theory in culture and advisory editor for American Book Review, is the author and editor/co-editor of fifteen books in critical theory and modernist literature, most recently the author of Virginia Woolf and the Modern Sublime: the Invisible Tribunal (Palgrave Pivots: 2015) and co-editor (with Donald E. Pease and Michelle Martin) of Humanist Criticism and the Secular Imperative: The William V. Spanos Reader (Northwestern University Press: 2015).

"O’hara takes a lifetime of reading Yeats as fertile ground from which he nourishes an appreciation of poetics as something richer with human experience than a mere academic theory can muster. O’hara writes with a poet’s passion for language. Here we have a bravura record of the kind of engagement with literary work that proves the life of the critic to be as vital a source of creative imagination as the artist whom he honors." —Alan Singer, Professor Emeritus of English, English Department, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA.

• Acknowledgments; Preface; Introduction: Dancer and Dance: Yeats’s Romantic Modernism and Critical Revisionism; 1. The Irony of Tradition in W.B. Yeats’s Autobiography: Dialectical Hermeneutics Beyond the New Criticism; 2. The Specialty of Self-Victimization: On Antithetical Revisionism; 3. Yeats in Theory: Blackmur, Bloom, De Man and Hartman; 4. The Divisions of Yeats Studies Continued; 5. Modernism’s Global Identity: On the Dogmatic Imagination in Yeats, Freud and Beyond; 6. Yeats with Lacan: Toward the Real Modernism; 7. The Spirit Medium: Yeats, Quantum Visions and Recent Lacanian Studies; 8. And All the Ceremonies to Come: Of High Modernism, Visionary Violence and Post-Marxism; Afterword: The Reader in Yeats; Bibliography; Index