This anthology brings together some of the relatively more stimulating and refreshing studies done on W.B.Yeats. It carries essays which revaluate the larger issues concerning Yeats’s work and thought in terms of recent critical theories and ideological perspectives, as also those which offer close critical readings of the poet’s individual poems. The critical discourse in these essays, at once sophisticated and perceptive, focuses, among others, on an alternative reading of Yeats’s poetry from feminist viewpoint, his ‘quarrel with modernism,’ his affinity with post-symbolist poetry, the pre-occupation with his Irish identity, and the phenomenon of violence in his later politics and poetry. No less does it help tracing the subtle but telling parallels between Yeats and Bakhtin as well as between Yeats and ‘the Hamlet Mask.’ It also offers, in equal measure, detailed and discerning critical attention to the poems, including “The Tower,” “The Second Coming,” “Among School Children,” “Leda and the Swan,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Easter 1916,” “Adams’s Curse,” and “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” The volume is designed to benefit the Yeats scholar as much as the common intelligent reader.

G.R. Taneja studied English and Comparative Literature at the University of Delhi, Acadia University and Queen’s University at Kingston, Canada. He is Reader in the Department of English, RLA College, University of Delhi. He publishes and edits In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism, a bi-annual review of English literary studies. Author of several essays including those on F.R. Leavis, Blake, Hardy, and contemporary Indian English fiction, he has co-edited a festschrift, Literature East and West: Essays presented to R.K. Dass Gupta (Allied, 1994) and a collection of essays on the writings of Salman Rushdie (Prestige, 1992). He is currently working on an annotated international bibliography, Hamlet 1970-1990, and a full-length study on Oscar Wilde’s interest in Shakespeare.