In 1928-29, politicians of the Irish Free State debated the Censorship of Publications Bill, which included a clause banning print media on contraception. They contended that ignorance of birth control would increase reproductive rates and prevent Irish “race suicide.” W. B. Yeats contested the Bill in the press, in part due to apprehension about Catholic population growth and dwindling Protestant numbers. This chapter positions the Free State’s “race suicide” debates into the context of their eugenic origins, and it argues that Yeats’s reaction to the Bill set the stage for his eugenic plan in On the Boiler, one that responded to what he believed was an Anglo-Irish “race suicide.” Through coded references to Irish class divisions, Yeats proposes restraints on Catholic reproductive rights, strategies of selective breeding among an Irish elite, and population control achieved through violence. His ideas about race and reproduction offer a study of scientific racism that reflects fringe and mainstream rhetoric that endures today in the form of “replacement theory.” An investigation of Yeats contributes to the ongoing, multidisciplinary effort to pinpoint the origins, development, and effects of theories that bring together questions of science, race, reproduction, and rights.

The making new that is generally seen as definitive of modernist practice covers a range of different ambitions and dispositions. The same mindset is also evident in literary-modernist treatments of animals, despite claims that the "modernist animal" does not really exist. This chapter examines a range of modernist works that advance their own singular zoopoetic insights, through two principal approaches to modernist animal studies. The first, characterized by "invention," comprises the fantastic beasts of Herman Melville (the White Whale), W. B. Yeats (mythological, eschatological, and mechanical creatures), and Djuna Barnes (human-animal becomings), which turn on the notion of hybridity and its multivalent effects. The second, the domestic, is centered on cats and dogs in the works of Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway, Flush), T. S. Eliot (“Prufrock,” Old Possum’s), and James Joyce (Ulysses). Yet these domestic animals are anything but commonplace or pedestrian, in that they reveal the otherness at the heart of companion species. Literary-modernist animals are thus legion, and it is in the dialectic between the fantastic and the domestic that their distinctive particularities can best be understood.

This chapter discusses centrism as another face of moderation. It distinguishes between various meanings of centrism and makes a connection between a vital center and political moderation. It also considers a few concrete topics on which a centrist agenda is possible and desirable.

The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

This chapter considers the poetry of leading Irish poets (including W. B. Yeats and Thomas MacGreevy) and how their poems encountered World War One both in contemporary time and also retrospectively, in the poems of Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney, among others. An important feature of this chapter is the retrieval of several forgotten or neglected voices, including Winifred Letts and Mary Devenport O’Neill. The politics of ‘Empire’ and the role of Irish nationalism are considered in the context of the country, north and south, concluding with a survey of Irish poets writing today and their understanding of the problematic legacies of World War One in relation to Irish literary, cultural, and political history.

This chapter considers the connections between modern Irish literature and the politics of nationalism, rebellion, partition, and sectarianism. It discusses key moments in the evolution of Irish culture and writing, including the 1798 rebellion, the revolutionary period of 1916–22, and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) registered the decisive impact of the fall in 1890 of the parliamentary leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, on the country and its literature. W. B Yeats seized on this moment of political crisis in order to launch a movement for cultural revival. Yet most Irish writing in the independent Irish state after 1922, although hostile to Catholic hegemony and to the censorship of art, was counter-revolutionary rather than aesthetically or politically radical. While Beckett explored the legacies of an experimental Irish modernism from Paris, realist novelists, such as John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, dominated the domestic scene. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the generation of poets and critics that emerged from Northern Ireland after the 1960s, including Seamus Deane, Tom Paulin, and Seamus Heaney.

Chapter 5 considers the implications of modernist efforts to rethink notions of gender and creative autonomy for our understanding of genius. Although some writers and artists imagined androgyny as something a man and woman could achieve together, the same does not appear to have been true of genius, which remains for the modernists a phenomenon exhibited or embodied by individuals. I contend that the modernists’ own practice of cross-sex collaboration challenges this conception, as evidenced by two examples: the play Cathleen ni Houlihan, by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, and the novel Under the Volcano, written by Malcolm Lowry with significant input from his second wife, Margerie Bonner Lowry. Neither of these masterpieces could have been realized by just one of its coauthors alone, yet no member of either couple thought of that couple itself as “a genius.” This limitation on the conception of genius came with significant personal costs and misrepresents the true nature of the writers’ powerful displays of joint creativity. Genius, I conclude, is not solely the provenance of individuals but an invaluable human capacity that can draw strength from both male and female participation.

Chapter 4 examines three instances where the juxtaposition of a man’s and a woman’s textual contributions aims to satisfy the modernist desire for androgyny. W. B. Yeats’s interest in androgyny is expressed through iconography that the artist Althea Gyles employed in her designs for the covers of his books The Secret Rose (1897) and Poems (1899), but it is also embodied by the material texts of those books themselves, which bring together a man’s words with a woman’s images. A similar collaborative dynamic is apparent in Marianne Moore’s 1936 volume The Pangolin and Other Verse, where poems that explore seemingly impossible meetings of difference work together with illustrations by the male artist George Plank to convey an androgynous vision. The chapter concludes by turning to the modernist writer most closely associated with androgyny, Virginia Woolf. Drawing on the famous image from A Room of One’s Own of a man and woman stepping into a taxi that spurs Woolf to write of the androgynous mind, I argue that Woolf’s dialogic “meeting” with her husband Leonard in their 1917 Hogarth Press volume Two Stories reflects her desire to achieve androgyny through cross-sex collaboration.

Chapter 3 examines the discord aesthetic in three cross-sex collaborations that sought to critique, invigorate, or reconfigure marriage. Violet Hunt and Ford Madox Ford in their 1913 travel book The Desirable Alien model an innovative conjugal dynamic that privileges articulations of disagreement and destabilizes fixed gender roles by placing the writers’ distinct textual contributions in unresolved dialogue. I then read a similar attempt to re-conceptualize marriage as a shared quest to negotiate conflict without eradicating it as central to W. B. Yeats and George Yeats’s practice of automatic writing in the early years of their marriage. Finally, I turn from these heterosexual couples to consider the collaboration between Marianne Moore, a celibate unmarried woman, and her gay male friend Monroe Wheeler on the publication of her poem “Marriage” as the third and final chapbook in Wheeler’s Manikin series in 1923. Far from reinforcing traditional gender roles and hierarchies, these examples show how cross-sex collaboration might serve as the basis for truly innovative marriages based on a couple’s shared commitment to mutual empowerment and gender flexibility.

One traditional solution to the problem of how modernist poetry began is to tell the story of a transition between Yeats’s early masterpieces and Eliot’s The Waste Land. This is a story which usually centres upon the rise of free verse and a growing urgency to represent the modern world. More recently, critics have looked to tell stories about neglected poets, in which less obviously experimental works are found nevertheless to represent that same modern world. Both approaches involve tracing continuities and ruptures, often with reference to the unprecedented ruptures and rapid developments which characterised life in Britain in the first two decades of the century. This chapter shifts the emphasis from deciding how poetry somehow made a miraculous leap from the fin de siècle to high modernism, to exploring how the poetic forms of diverse poets working at this time refract the very conception and experience of transition, and especially the experience of transition when no certain beginning or end is in sight. The aim here is thus to resist the logic of literary history’s usual narratives, and to show that the poems of this period do so too at the level of poetic technique.

This chapter charts the transition, in British literature of the early twentieth century, from the Decadence associated with Wilde and his generation to the modernism associated with Eliot and his generation. If criticism has readily acknowledged that London, as the locus of an emergent modernist sensibility, was bound up in geographically extended networks of transatlantic and European literary practice, the story of historical transition from Decadence to modernism has been less often told. With particular reference to the poetries of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, the chapter shows how the aesthetics of Decadence were reconfigured and repurposed by modernist writers, before turning in a brief coda to the counter-example of W. B. Yeats, for whom questions of Decadence and modernism were bound up with the national politics of a changing Ireland.

Chapter 2 surveys some different ways in which Asia features in the Irish literary imagination from Lafcadio Hearn and W. B. Yeats to the present. Ronan Sheehan’s Foley’s Asia, dealing with a celebrated nineteenth-century Irish sculptor of imperial monuments, and Naoise Dolan’s Exciting Times, set in Hong Kong against the backdrop of a ‘rising China’, are its contemporary examples. In early twentieth-century writing, Asia represented an exotic non-modern alternative to Western modernity. Later, it served as a backdrop to the fall of the British Empire. More recently, it suggests a strange new hyper-modernity with which the West will have to catch up. In all versions, Asia is conceived somewhere between the exotic and apocalyptic, a world at once tantalizing and threatening.

Although he is usually thought of as a poet who wrote for the theatre, W. B. Yeats was a theatre practitioner for almost fifty years, and was closely involved in every aspect of producing his plays.As a consummate theorist of the theatre, he thus produced theories relating to theatre space, the use of colour, and an understanding of the uncanny power of objects that prefigures later phenomenological thinking on the same subject.He formulates these precepts early in the 1900s, laying down principles for the use of colour, for instance (two main colours and an accent only), but by the time of his more mature work, he is using objects – such as the severed heads that appear in his later plays – in a way that develops his own thinking on the relation between thought and matter.Indeed, a consideration of Yeats’s understanding of the physical elements of performance shows him to be someone who thinks through the medium of theatre, to borrow a concept from Alain Badiou; using the nature of performance as a means of thought.

W. B. Yeats began writing about the theatre in the mid-1890s, after a trip to Paris where he first saw French symbolist theatre.From the time that the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) began producing his plays in the early 1900s, Yeats was regularly, and vigorously writing about theatre, with key essays appearing in the little magazines Samhain and Beltaine.From about 1910 onwards, his writing about theatre becomes more meditative, more concerned with his occult interests, and for a period focused on his interest in Japanese Nō theatre.Collectively, Yeats’s fugitive writings for the theatre constitutes an organum for the theatre, which is consistent across more than forty years, and which stands among the most significant contributions to modernist reconceptualisations of theatre.

As with his theorisation of theatre space, W. B. Yeats developed a complex theorisation of bodies, masks, and voices in performance. Like other aspects of his performance theory, these grew out of his own production experience, in which he could be said to have workshopped his theories.By the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century, he was writing his Plays for Dancers, in which the moving body is put in dialogue with the spoken word in ways that challenge our view of Yeats as a poet who wrote for the theatre. Likewise, his use of voices – particularly disembodied voices – in his theatre shows a thinking through of the phenomenology of the voice.However, it is in relation to the mask, which he theorises with such complexity in works such as A Vision, that we most clearly see Yeats as someone who thinks through theatre, to borrow a concept from Alain Badiou; using the nature of performance as a means of thought.

W. B. Yeats began work on his theory of theatre in the early 1900s in his writings for the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey, and these included a series of precepts for dramaturgy that encompassed character, action, and language.For Yeats, dramatic character was not simply a mimetic representation of a personality; instead, it was a set of human possibilities defined by an action.Yeats would ultimately relate this theory to his wider understanding of personality and action developed in his poetry, and in writings such as A Vision.Likewise, his theories of the language appropriate to drama, and the techniques that should be used to capture the quality of speech, are closely related to his own development as a poet.Indeed, there is an argument to be made that all of his poetry from about 1900 onwards is theatrical, in the sense that it implies a voice.Collectively, Yeats’s writings on theory constitute a coherent treatise on dramatic construction.

This overview of W. B. Yeats’s writings for the theatre begins with his earliest juvenilia, the verse dramas published in the late 1880s, and moves through his best-known work with the Irish Literary Theatre (later the Abbey) in the early twentieth century through to his Nō plays and finally to his last plays, drawing on the techniques of genetic literary criticism to explore the drafts and multiple editions of these works.It also explores, for the first time, several of Yeats’s early unpublished plays in the context of his wider dramatic output.

Throughout his life, W. B. Yeats used the terms ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’ in relation to the theatre.However, it is clear that his understanding of these terms did not derive from Aristotle.He also frequently mentions Nietzsche, and particularly Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; however, he uses Nietzsche’s theory of tragedy in an unique and distinctive way.For Yeats, tragic theatre was what he referred to as 'subjective', a term he develops in his occult and philosophical works, particularly A Vision, and which he relates to vision, thought, and the individual.'Comedy', by contrast, is what Yeats considers to be 'objective', concerned with the material world and its manifestations, including the body, and rationality.Based on this opposition, Yeats lays the foundations for a theory of theatre that is distinctive, and which shapes his own theatrical practice.