Yeats and national identity.
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Date
2008
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Abstract
In this thesis I set out WB Yeats' s conception of Irish national identity as a non-essentialist, inclusive, and imaginative construct. I do so against the backdrop of Edward Said's construction of Yeats, within the field of postcolonial theory, as a poet of decolonization who stops short of imagining Ireland's full political liberation from colonial rule. I propound that, on the contrary, Yeats does imagine full liberation in proposing his Doctrine of the Mask as a method for the creation of what, I argue, is an emphatically 'postcolonial' national identity. What this identity entails is elucidated by an examination of key issues of 'nation-ness' explored by various theorists, particularly Benedict Anderson; the historical contextualization of Yeats in the Ireland of his times; and a close reading of particularly Yeats's two major 'occult' works: Per Amica Si/entia Lunae and A Vision. Overall, I make several important contributions to 'postcolonial' Yeats scholarship - a far from exhausted field of study. Firstly, I demonstrate that the incorporation of the modernist Yeats's 'occult' dimension - a dimension disparaged and dismissed by Said - into Said's construction of Yeats as a 'postcolonial' figure serves to bolster rather than undermine this construction. Secondly, I demonstrate that, while Said claims Frantz Fanon goes further than Yeats in imagining full liberation in the colonial context, there are in fact striking parallels between Fanon's narrative of liberation in particularly The Wretched a/the Earth and Yeats's 'occult' works, particularly A Vision. The comparison with Fanon, I show, underlines that Yeats does indeed imagine full liberation, especially at the level of Irish national identity. Thirdly, I demonstrate the link, heretofore unnoted by Yeats critics, between Matthew Amold' s defining of the Irish as racially inferior and Yeats's liberationist discourse in Per Amica Silentia Lunae and A Vision. I show that Yeats subversively mobilises Arnold's terms to debunk Amold and buttress a distinctly Yeatsian conception of Irish national identity. Lastly, I highlight the 'Yeatsian' complexion of the contemporary South African context, arguing that the consideration ofYeats's conception of Irish national identity may assist South Africans in forging a nonessentialist, inclusive national identity and national unity.
Description
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2008.
Keywords
Yeats, William Butler, 1865-1939--Political and social views., Nationalism and literature., Theses--English.