Neil Mann

Matthew Gibson

Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult is a collection of essays examining the thought of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats and particularly his philosophical reading and explorations of older systems of thought, where philosophy, mysticism, and the supernatural blend. It opens with a broad survey of the current state of Yeats scholarship, which also includes an examination of Yeats's poetic practice through a manuscript of the original core of a poem that became a work of philosophical thought and occult lore, "The Phases of the Moon. " The following essay examines an area where spiritualism, eugenic theory, and criminology cross paths in the writings of Cesare Lombroso, and Yeats's response to his work. The third paper considers Yeats's debts to the East, especially Buddhist and Hindu thought, while the fourth looks at his ideas about the dream-state, the nature of reality, and contact with the dead. The fifth essay explores Yeats's understanding of the concept of the Great Year from classical astronomy and philosophy, and its role in the system of his work A Vision, and the sixth paper studies that work's theory of "contemporaneous periods" affecting each other across history in the light of Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. The seventh essay evaluates Yeats's reading of Berkeley and his critics' appreciation (or lack of it) of how he responds to Berkeley's idealism. The book as a whole explores how Yeats's mind and thought relate to his poetry, drama, and prose, and how his reading informs all of them.

Yeats, Philosophy, and the Occult

This iconoclastic book challenges and changes accepted opinions about the Gothic novel, and will introduce the British and American Reader to works hitherto unknown to them, but rivals in quality to the works of writers like Radcliffe, Lewis and Stoker.

History, Literature and the French Revolution

The Fantastic and European Gothic

Claire Nally

W. B. Yeats's "A Vision": Explications and Contexts' is the first volume of essays devoted to 'A Vision' and the associated system developed by W. B. Yeats and his wife, George. 'A Vision' is all-encompassing in its stated aims and scope, and it invites a wide range of approaches-asdemonstrated in the essays collected here, written by the foremost scholars in the field. The first six essays present explications of broader themes in 'A Vision' itself: the system's general principles; incarnate life and the Faculties; discarnate life and the Principles; how Yeats relates his own work to other philosophical approaches; and his consideration of the historical process.A further three essays include an examination of the elusive 'Thirteenth Cone', a consideration of astrological features in the automatic script, and a view of the poetry within 'A Vision'. The final five essays look at contextual themes, whether of collaboration and influence-between husband, wife,and spirits, or with another poet-or the gender perspective within these interrelations, the historical context of Golden-Dawn occultism or the broader political context of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, the different contributors take a variety of stances with regard to texts and theautomatic script. This is an important contribution to Yeats scholarship in general and a landmark in studies of 'A Vision'.

Matthew Gibson

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