Best Selling Books by Richard J. Finneran

This is the first of a fourteen-volume edition of Yeats’s work issued under the general editorship of Richard Finneran and George Mills Harper. A necessary read for Yeats devotees, Seamus Heaney writes, “All readers of Yeats will need this book; when they open it they will feel a surprise like that experienced by St. Brendan the Navigator and his crew when they disembarked upon an island that turned out to be the back of a dormant sea monster.”

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes include virtually all of the Nobel laureate''s published work, in authoritative texts with extensive explanatory notes. Early Essays, edited by the internationally esteemed Yeats scholars George Bornstein and the late Richard J. Finneran, includes the contents of the two most important collections of Yeats''s critical prose, Ideas of Good and Evil(1903) and The Cutting of an Agate(1912, 1919). Among the seminal essays are considerations of Blake, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, and Synge, as well as an extended discussion of the Japanese Noh theatre. The first scholarly edition of these materials, Early Essays offers a corrected text and detailed annotation of all allusions. Several appendices gather materials from early printings which were later excluded, as well as illuminating black-and-white illustrations. Early Essays is an essential sourcebook for understanding Yeats''s career as both writer and literary critic, and for the development of modern poetry and criticism. Here, Yeats works out many of his key ideas on poetry, politics, and the theater. He gives interpretations of writers critical to his development and presents a compelling vision of Ireland and the modern world during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first two decades of the twentieth. As T. S. Eliot remarked, Yeats "was one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them." This volume displays a crucial part of that history.

This study is a companion to the revised edition of W.B.Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition. Professor Finneran outlines the complex problems facing an editor of Yeats''s poetry and explains the solutions adopted in the new text. Manuscript materials are drawn on extensively, including some which have recently come to light in the Scribner Archives at the University of Texas and at Princeton University. Compared with the first edition of this volume (Editing Yeats''s Poems, 1983), there is an additional chapter - on the order of the poems - as well as new information on the Scribner Edition and other revisions throughout.

Drawing upon both published and unpublished material, Finneran traces the relationship between Yeats and Stephens, his protege, a relationship which is significant not only to the careers of both writers, but also to the history of Anglo-Irish Litera

Collection of articles and essays originally published 1958-1983.