The Edinburgh Companion to W. B. Yeats and the Arts

The first book to comprehensively address Yeats's engagements across the arts as both writer and cultural workerIncludes detailed case studies which capture the complex history of Yeats as an inter-arts thinker and collaboratorPresents a wide variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, including from scholars of literature, aesthetics, drama, music, dance and the visual arts, as well as perspectives drawn from Victorian, Fin de siècle and Modernist studiesOffers the latest critical thinking on the intersections between Yeats's interest in the arts, his role as an active public figure and the socio-political and ideological nature of his writings Features new work exploring many arts in combination, as well as focused, fully illustrated analyses of individual arts to appeal to a wide variety of readers and practitionersW. B. Yeats was not only a poet but also a cultural revolutionary. A restless collaborator, he fostered countless artistic enterprises, from the Abbey Theatre to the Cuala Press, and pursued various inter-artistic media and forums for his work. From childhood co-creations with his siblings to the arresting combination of sound and movement in his final play, The Death of Cuchulain, his work also repeatedly addresses and incorporates music, dance, and the visual, material and theatrical arts with remarkable intensity. For him, literature was a vital thing that engaged, in one form or another, all the senses. This volume's newly commissioned chapters analyse afresh such engagements. Bringing together scholars of literature, aesthetics, cultural history and specialists in drama, music, dance and the visual arts, they provide a broad range of historical, conceptual, and disciplinary approaches and perspectives.