The Words Upon the Windowpane: Manuscript Materials (The Cornell Yeats) - Hardcover

Yeats, W. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801440475 ISBN 13: 9780801440472

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2002

Synopsis

Words upon the Window Pane, first staged in 1930, is W. B. Yeats's most powerful and brilliant dramatic exploration of the occult, in which he had a lifelong interest, and an affirmation of Anglo-Irish Protestant cultural ascendancy. Written at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate, it features a seance in which Jonathan Swift's voice is projected through a medium. Like Yeats, Swift was both politician and poet, and taking Swift as his subject allowed Yeats to cloak a political message under personal character. Quite probably based on an obscure one-act play called Swift and Stella by Charles Edward Lawrence, Lady Gregory's editor, the play is centered on a romantic triangle involving Jonathan Swift and two women, Vanessa and Stella. Yeats's use of a seance as a frame permits him to compare the present with the past by putting twentieth-century Dubliners side by side with Swift's contemporaries. This volume of the Cornell Yeats contains transcriptions and photographic reproductions of the drafts of Words upon the Window Pane, with variant readings from proofs, typescripts, and notebook entries, as well as other materials pertaining to its writing, publication, and performance.

About this title

About the Author:

The late Mary FitzGerald was Professor of English and Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The late Richard J. Finneran was Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Jared Curtis is Professor Emeritus of English at Simon Fraser University. Ann Saddlemyer is Professor Emeritus of Drama at University of Toronto and adjunct Professor of English at the University of Victoria.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0801440475
• ISBN 13: 9780801440472
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: FitzGerald Mary